


Closed Book

by AggressiveWhenStartled



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A lot of things, Amnesia, Arguing, At least one more, How did it become a Bucky&Tony comedy hour brofic, How many times can Bucky get amnesia, M/M, Natasha Is a Good Bro, So I guess it accomplishes both things, Supersoldier sex can break things, This fic is not compliant with anything, This was supposed to be stupid Stucky fluff, Tony Stark has a lot of feelings, Upside still a lot of Stucky fluff, what the hell happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2018-12-10 20:07:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11699007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AggressiveWhenStartled/pseuds/AggressiveWhenStartled
Summary: Bucky woke up with a headache, a mouth that tasted like something had died in it, and hands-down, swear-to-god, the most beautiful man he had ever seen asleep in his lap.Bucky was also, he realized after a moment, strapped down to a hospital bed with about six different monitors making unsynced, equally piercing, beeps. Beyond that he couldn’t quite see—there was a hideous floral curtain pulled around the bed, and while he could just make out figures moving in the room beyond it, the pattern made his head pound even worse the longer he looked at it.So. That was concerning.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I started writing [Open Book](), and then marvel movies happened, and I couldn't really continue it without giving up entirely on canon. Then I started rewriting it here, and I'm probably going to just completely ignore canon again, but this time it will be voluntary.
> 
> If you've already read Open Book, LOADS of things are going to be changed, so don't worry about spoilers.
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH to [silentwalrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus) for betaing this chapter so quickly and so well. You have them to thank for several beautifully crafted similes that were horrible and perfect and everything I want in my stucky.

Bucky woke up with a headache, a mouth that tasted like something had died in it, and hands-down, swear-to-god, the most beautiful man he had ever seen asleep in his lap.

Bucky was also, he realized after a moment, strapped down to a hospital bed with about six different monitors making unsynced, yet equally piercing, beeps. Beyond that he couldn’t quite see—there was a hideous floral curtain pulled around the bed, and while he could just make out figures moving in the room beyond it, the pattern made his head pound even worse the longer he looked at it. 

So. That was concerning. 

On the other hand: really just _stunning_ man in his lap. Christ, he was gorgeous. Bucky felt better already. When he woke up, this guy was getting Bucky’s best charm offensive straight to the kisser.

After a moment Bucky shifted a little. His nose _really_ itched. Maybe he could…? Bucky twisted and contorted his face, then the rest of him—no dice. He managed to wiggle his toes a little, but they were not getting anywhere near his nose unless someone came along with a set of bolt cutters. Maybe Adonis had some? Adonis sure looked like the kind of guy who could answer Bucky’s most fervent prayers and fantasies, so maybe he would let him scratch his nose, too.

The Living Work of Art and Beauty made a soft, drowsy sound, and fluttered his _holy shit gorgeous_ blue eyes open. He lifted his head, blinked sleepily, and—

“Shit!” Adonis blurted, then snapped bolt upright in his chair and directly into the overhanging lamp with a clang. He jerked right back down again, clutching his head and cursing, pained. “Ow! Shit!”

Hopefully Adonis could say more than “ow,” and “shit,” but Bucky supposed with a face like that, you didn’t really need to. If it turned out all his positive points had been poured into looks, Bucky would still happily take care of him for the rest of his life anyway. He watched, bemused, and the man of his dreams gave him a small, sheepish smile, which obviously went straight to Bucky’s dick.

Not literally, of course. God, that would have been fantastic. But no.

“Hey,” Sexy Eyes managed, rubbing the back of his head and leaning in close, and Bucky _knew_ that look, oh god yes. _Yes_. Sexy Eyes was totally into him, it was obvious and glorious and Bucky couldn’t believe his good luck, which seemed to be getting better by the minute despite the fact that he was trussed up like a Christmas turkey on a medical gurney.

Bucky, in the interest of helping his luck along, tried to smile without opening his mouth-- that lingering dead taste on his tongue would doubtless translate into really rancid, awful breath. Bucky was grabbing on to this with both damn hands. He was not going to miss out on Mr. Sexy Eyes McDreamboat because he smiled too hard.

“Hey,” Bucky said, and the sexy eyes crinkled up, so Bucky’s breath was either okay or Perfect Face was into him enough not to care. “What say you unstrap me here,” Bucky suggested, lowering his voice so his living fantasy had to lean in closer, “and you can tie me up again somewhere else?”

Perfect Face blushed all over his, well, perfect face. Bucky was _smitten_. And having a difficult time not thinking about everything _else_ he wanted to do all over that perfect face, too.

“I can’t,” Adonis managed, clearly struck by the thought, and Bucky smirked. 

“You’re right, you don’t need to,” Bucky murmured, twisting suggestively. He tilted his head back and looked him over through his lashes; Adonis’ eyes flicked to his mouth and his breath caught. “Look at you. You can hold me down and make me beg for it instead, easy. I’d be up for that too.”

“Um. I’ll just. Uh, yeah. Just—“ The guy stood and turned, and _wow_ , after the eyes and mouth, that was definitely Bucky’s favorite part of him. Chiseled Ass of Beauty poked his head out of the curtain, then ducked back in give him a reassuring smile. “I’m so sorry, Buck, it’s just until everyone is certain you’re not going to, uh.” He looked uncomfortable. “You know. Do something you didn’t mean to.”

Bucky twisted his head and gave him a concerned look. “Babe, I’m pretty sure the only thing I want to do right now is get my circulation back so I can hit on you properly.”

Glorious Buttcheeks gave him a sweet, anxious smile, his dimples making a hesitant show, and Bucky felt a little pang in his heart even as he felt the equally insistent pang in his dick. “Come on, man,” Bucky wheedled, pulling a little. “My nose really itches, too.”

“Tony made me swear on my mother’s grave,” Dimples explained, anguished. “He made me swear on  _your_  mother’s grave. Mrs. Barnes would haunt me for the rest of our  _lives_.”

Bucky stuck his lip out. “Alright then, Mr. Boy Scout, when’s the doctor going to be in to unbuckle ‘em?” He leered. “And more importantly, what are you doing after?”

Dimples paused, then said softly, “Anything you want to.” 

Holy _shit_. 

Bucky’s leer transformed into a grin that stretched all the way across his face, and whatever had landed him in a hospital with his brain hooked up to eight million wires and probes was _worth it_. Had it been a fall down the stairs? Worth it. A car accident? Worth it. Had he been trapped, Saw style, and had to cut off a limb to escape? _Still so worth it_.

“Yeah?” Bucky breathed, “Well.” He settled back in the bed as much as he was able, which wasn’t very much, and tilted his hips again as far as the straps would allow. He caught Dimples looking and gave a wolfish grin in return. “So what’s your name, handsome? Have we met before this? I could swear you look familiar.”

Bucky had no idea what he’d done, but it was obvious he’d somehow screwed it all up. The abrupt mask of misery and horror totally transformed the guy’s face, and suddenly this wasn’t fun anymore. “Steve,” the guy croaked, eyes latched on his, hunching forward like Bucky had just sucker punched him in the gut. Bucky panicked, trying to figure out what had just happened. This was awful. “It’s… Steve.”

“Okay, Steve,” he said, cajoling. “Hey, Steve, baby, what’s wrong? Lemme up, hey.” He stretched out his fingers as far as they would reach, barely brushing Steve’s hand. Steve looked like he was going to cry. Bucky was sure he would be tragically beautiful doing it, but it wouldn’t make it any less painful to watch. “What did I say?”

“No, it’s—” Steve lurched back towards the curtain. “I only—”

“Huh.” A guy with a goatee and a face Bucky simultaneously wanted to punch and hide from tossed back the curtain, stylus in his mouth, with what looked like a high-end Smartpad held at arms’ length. “I didn’t know Hydra was into this kind of thing. So, what, a sexy amnesia brain chip? Is he supposed to seduce you to the dark side, Capsicle? Good luck with that, Red, Steve’s as straight as apple pie.”

“Which is, as we all know, world-renowned for its heterosexuality,” a female voice interjected over some sort of loudspeaker.

“Thanks for that input, Friday,” the guy said.

Bucky and Steve cut them both identical glares, which wasn’t easy to do with a disembodied voice coming from a speaker in the ceiling. “Tony,” Steve said, clearly tired.

“Upside,” Tony continued cheerfully, ignoring him, “judging from that look, Death Stare doesn’t want to have sex with me, so silver linings and all that.” He tapped a few things on the screen. “Purely in the interests of science, Bucko, anything else around the room you want to sleep with? The chair? Friday? Natasha’s outside, we could bring her in to show off her—”

“If you finish that sentence,” Steve cut in, “I will tell her that you did.”

Tony snapped his mouth shut.

“Fun as it sounds, I’m not planning on any of that.” Bucky pulled on his straps experimentally. “But I do have the strangest urge to beat your head against the floor. I wonder why.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Steve offered faintly, “you already have.”

Bucky brightened. “That does make me feel better, actually.”

“Try it when you don’t have backup,” Tony groused, poking Bucky in the arm with something. Bucky flinched and swore at him. “Alright, Sleeping Beauty, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“You stabbing me with that whatsit, jerkface,” Bucky complained. Steve didn’t crack a smile.

Tony sneered. “Hilarious! How about before you woke up?”

Bucky opened his mouth.

Then he closed it.

“Three words,” Tony offered, “Starts with a…”

Bucky had nothing. He stared at the ugly curtain.

“Upside,” Tony said to Steve, spinning his stylus and pretending not to notice the disappointed/wretched/furious glower Steve was leveling at him, “Hydra’s consistent. Amnesia’s not even that bad! It only took, what, a few years in hiding and your shattered cheekbones to get over last time? And I hear you only had to keep him from offing himself, like, twenty times while we’ve been fixing the magic words here. Thirty, tops. It’ll be old hat by now, your place is already baby-proofed.”

“You know, Stark,” Steve growled, fists clenched, “when people say, ‘I want to patch things up,’ usually they try to be a _little_ less of an asshole while they do it.”

“Yeah, and usually I bet I would have run you off already. Too bad you need me so badly,” Tony replied snidely, and turned back to Bucky. “So guess what! You get to have a whole lot more tests done. On a scale of death scowl to murder, how excited are you?”

Bucky glared.

“Unsurprising,” Tony announced, and stabbed him with another needle.

***

Bucky felt like a kid who’d finally gotten a pony for Christmas, only to have it take a huge shit on his front porch and then set it on fire.

Metaphorically, of course. He couldn’t actually say with complete certainty, since, obviously: amnesia, but he felt reasonably sure he did not own a porch-shitting, pyromaniacal pony.

On the pony side, Steve Rogers was not just a pretty face. Bucky was completely certain he was the most amazing, beautiful, perfect person Bucky had ever met in his entire life, despite not remembering much of anything he had seen in said entire life. On the flaming shitty porch side, he was strapped to a table in a room filled with bright lights, being poked and stabbed and asked a million and one incomprehensible questions by This Asshole Tony.

Some of the questions he had been asked so far were:

• What is the current vaccination schedule for American children?  
• Do you know what a selfie is?  
• How do you feel about Germans?  
• Here do this math problem no you can’t use your hands no Steve you can’t unstrap him yet.

“Okay. So. Okay.”

Despite being the literal personification of all Bucky’s most closely held fantasies, though, Steve was also probably the biggest human disaster Bucky had ever met. Bucky watched the guy search for words and wished yet again that someone would finally unstrap him, but this time only so he could pat the poor bastard on the head and offer him some cocoa. 

“Here’s the thing,” Steve tried again. “You can do whatever you want, I’m not making you do anything.”

“Spit it out, Stevie,” Bucky ordered, smiling as encouragingly as he could when it looked like Steve was getting ready to invite him to a funeral. “You’re making me nervous.”

Steve closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “Please don’t leave.” He covered his face with his frankly enormous hands, took another gasp of air, and ran them up and through his boy scout haircut. It stuck out at weird angles and made him look _adorable_. “You don’t know me, I know. I’m just some huge stupid stranger that’s falling apart all over you, but I can calm down, I won’t pressure you to remember.” His voice cracked, and he blinked and stared at his feet. “Don’t leave again.”

“Well,” Bucky said slowly, feeling a little unglued. “I’m kind of still strapped in place at the moment. So.”

Steve gave a sad, desperate laugh and pinched his brow. “Right. So, after. After, you know, the people who have been poking you with needles and refusing to answer your questions unstrap you from the table in the secret basement in an undisclosed location, please don’t run for your life.”

Bucky stared at him. “You are _awful_ at this,” he said after a moment, aghast. “Holy shit, do they just let you wander around talking in public?”

Steve dropped his face into the mattress and covered his head with his arms. “Sometimes they give me a script,” he said, muffled. “I’m better at talking in situations where there’s someone to punch really hard immediately afterwards.”

“Jesus, I hope so.” Bucky said. “Alright, beautiful, I don’t plan on leaving, even after Dr. Needles unstraps me and I’m upstairs and outside. Okay?” He was still buckled down, but he stretched his fingers enough to touch Steve’s hair. It felt amazing. All of Steve probably felt amazing. If he ran for the hills he wouldn’t get to find out. “It’ll be alright. I’m not going to run screaming.”

He probably _should_ , though. It was becoming more and more clear to him what a huge helping of crazy had been dealt to pretty much everyone in the room.

But. _Steve_. 

That was when Tony decided to yank the curtain back and grin at them.

“I need to record this shit and put it on YouTube,” he announced, and Steve got a constipated look on his face.

Eventually they all agreed to unstrap him from the table, which was frankly the second best news he’d gotten all day, after discovering the fact that Steve existed. They were apparently still worried he would freak out and kill someone, though, so they were waiting for some heavy hitter to arrive since everyone in the room (Bucky grudgingly included) was pretty sure Steve wouldn’t do much if he did, except maybe cry.

“And we’re friends,” Steve assured him anxiously, “best friends. We really are. I promise you. You know me.”

“Breathe,” Bucky told him, slightly alarmed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Although you clearly should run as fast and as soon as you can, holy shit,” Tony interrupted, yanking the curtain back again to hold out his phone for a picture. The fake shutter snap made Steve’s eye twitch. “Cap sounds like he wants to turn your skin into a lampshade.”

***

“James.” A woman strolled in. Her hair curled around her head, she had bright red lipstick on her mouth, and she was carrying so many knives that she should have clinked when she walked. Bucky gave her a bright smile that slid sideways as soon as she continued, “I’m Natasha. I will kick the shit out of you if I need to, no matter how much it makes Steve cry. Nothing personal.”

Bucky was, for a moment, entirely speechless. He turned and gave Steve a wordless look, and Steve just shrugged. 

“She hits really hard,” Tony assured Bucky from behind a tablet.

“Uh,” Bucky managed, turning back to stare at her. “Okay?”

“Good,” she said breezily, sliding into a chair and looking unconcerned. “What do we know so far?” she asked, while Steve fell over himself to unstrap Bucky from the bed.

The female voice came from the ceiling again. “James has lost most of his episodic memories, but kept many of the emotions associated with them. No obvious pattern other than Captain Rogers.” Tony shrugged, when Natasha furrowed her brow and looked at him, as if that should be self-explanatory. “What he’s kept is mixed—he can speak French and some German, but no Russian. He’s not concerned about homosexuality, and displays a familiar confidence with modern technology, but not reliably.”

Natasha ticked her jaw to the side, thinking. “He doesn’t look upset to be here.”

Tony nodded. “He woke up strapped to a cot in a strange medical facility, but he hasn’t panicked once. As long as Steve’s around, Barnes is fine.”

“Barnes is also right here,” Bucky pointed out, sitting up and rubbing his arms. 

“Which makes this demonstration much easier,” Tony said, tossing a screwdriver in the air a few times as he sauntered over. Bucky gave him the side-eye but didn’t comment. “Alright, Red, quit thinking, close your eyes for a bit, then take a look at this woman and tell me your first thoughts.”

Bucky looked at Natasha, opened his mouth, closed it, and blushed. 

“Okay, hot stuff, quit checking out Natasha and look at me.” Tony spread his arms. “What do you think with you look at me?”

“I hate your face,” Bucky said immediately.

“See?” Tony turned to Natasha. “He doesn’t remember anything about Friday at all. But me? Exactly the same.”

“You _have_ just spent the entire day being an asshole,” Steve muttered.

“No,” Bucky interrupted, “I mean literally, I hate your face. I feel like guilty shit whenever I look at it. I don’t have a really strong opinion of you personally.”

Tony was silent for a moment, then a brilliant smile slowly lit his face. “Good,” he said, realization dawning. “You should.”

“Uh,” Bucky said again. “Sorry?”

“Tony,” Natasha murmured.

“No, don’t be.” Tony was grinning, now, so wide he looked a bit deranged. More deranged than he had been so far, which honestly, was a lot. “I hope you feel that way _forever_.”

“What about Steve?” Natasha asked, pulling the conversation back on track.

Bucky’s blush when he’d looked at Natasha had absolutely nothing on this one. Bucky felt like his face was on fire. He probably looked like he wanted to _eat_ him. Words like _whipped cream_ and _edible underwear_ were probably scrolling across his forehead in real time. 

“Right,” Steve managed, looking both elated and embarrassed. “Okay.”

“Ooooh, rough,” Tony said, patting Bucky on the back. “Sorry pal. Better luck next time.”

Bucky swung his legs over the side of the bed, confused, and turned back to Steve. “Wait. I thought we were together. We _must_ be together. Aren't we?”

“No,” said Tony.

“Yes,” said Steve.

“ _What?_ ” said Tony, “Since _when_?”

“Since before Hitler?” Steve answered, frowning. “Did you not notice how pleased I was when I found out homosexuality was legal now? Sam threw me a party. You were there. You brought that hugely offensive cake that I wouldn’t have shown to a--”

“I thought you were just proud of America!” Tony protested, mouth agape. 

“I _was_.” Steve spread his hands. “I was _also_ excited I wouldn’t be arrested if anyone found out I was blowing my roommate anymore.”

Tony turned to Natasha, who looked like she was watching a tennis match. “Did you know?” Tony asked plaintively. “Natasha, did you know? Did you keep it from me? Did you all keep this from me?”

“I’m not joining this discussion,” Natasha told him cheerfully. “I’m okay watching it explode without my help.”

“I didn’t keep it from anyone,” Steve snapped, losing his temper. “Did you not notice Bucky and I sleep in the same bed? I know you snoop, and all our clothes are in the same room.”

“I thought that was a 1940s thing!” Tony shouted, taking on a hysterical note.

“You thought sodomy was a 1940s thing,” Steve said flatly.

“Yes! No! I mean you were all poor, you couldn’t afford more than one bed!” He turned to Natasha. “That’s a poor person thing, right? Poor people sleep in the same bed?”

“I’m not sure you can hear yourself right now,” Natasha told him, holding out her phone and tapping the screen, “but rest assured I’m recording it to remind you later.”

“Tony, you gave me an apartment with _seven rooms_ ,” Steve reminded him, waving both arms in the what was presumably the direction of said apartment. “We have three _completely empty king sized beds_. We can afford to sleep separately, _we just don’t want to_.”

Tony looked lost. “I thought… I thought you were still doing it as a comfort thing?”

“Yes.” Steve exploded, incredulous. “Yes we were. Also as a _sex thing_. What the hell did you think that mortifying conversation was about last month, when I asked you to please stop Friday asking if we needed assistance every time our heart rates went up and we started shouting?”

“I think I’m going to sink into the ground and die now,” Bucky said to Natasha conversationally. “You?”

“I’m good,” said Natasha, rapt.

“Oh my god, were you having _sex_ every time I got that alert?” Tony squawked, horrified. “I was notified every time the Winter Soldier was defiling the symbol of our country and I _didn’t even know it_?” Tony’s jaw hung open, and Steve looked like he wanted to knock it right off his face. “Some of those weren’t even in your floor, some of them were-- _oh my god did you have sex with him in the showers_? Did you have sex with the Winter Soldier in the gym showers and I haven’t cleansed them with fire?” 

“They’re independent lockable rooms!” Steve yelled. “We were naked and alive and alone after getting beaten black and blue, Bucky had almost died on that last stupid mission you talked me into, _of course we had_ —“

“Just a note,” Friday cut in. “You may not have realized, Captain Rogers, that you are in a semi-public area discussing your sexual relations. Loudly. Where there are other people. Who can all hear you. I thought I would just bring that to your attention.”

Steve froze, mouth still open, and Bucky was pretty sure all the blood in Steve’s body had just rushed directly to his face. Steve dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. Bucky tried to think of something to say.

“But by all means, go on,” Natasha insisted, eyes on her phone, typing full-speed. “I could listen to this all day. I’m live-texting it to Sam as we speak. He says he wants a video, so if you could go back over the ‘sodomy is a 1940s thing’ again, that would be ideal. It’s going to be my ringtone for you forever.”

“Bucky,” Steve said to the ceiling, “can we please go back to the apartment. Where I will pretend this was all a horrible dream.” 

“Does it get to be the kind of dream where we both end up realizing we’re suddenly naked?” Bucky asked. Apparently needling Steve trumped abject mortification and amnesia, no problem. “I’d be kinda up for that kind of dream, sounds like you might be too.”

Steve hid his face in his hands.

“It had better not be until you get back to your own floor,” Tony griped, and Natasha smacked him in the arm as Steve made an immediate retreat with Bucky in tow.

“Does the elevator count?” Bucky shouted over his shoulder, and Steve stabbed at the button to close the doors before Tony could manage a reply.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative titles for this fic:
> 
>   * The Steely Blond's Amnesiac Groom ft. Dicking
>   * Double Dicking ft. Amnesia
>   * Steve and Bucky have a Dick (I guess they each have a dick? So two dicks between them?)
>   * Steve and Bucky have two dicks between them (Except that sounds like they are separated by two disembodied dicks)
>   * Fuck this I hate everything read my nerd story
>   * PENIS
> 

> 
> Also interestingly there haven't even been any dick sightings in this fic yet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony is feeling a LOT of feelings right now, not even all from CACW, which will be explored more later. Promise.
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH to [silentwalrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus) and [ thigmotaxis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thigmotaxis) for their amazing beta skills. This chapter would not be half the chapter it is without them.

Bucky didn’t even wait for them to reach their floor—he had Steve slammed up against the wall and flushed bright red from his brows to his navel three seconds after the doors closed. The metal behind him buckled, and Bucky slid his thigh between Steve’s, rocking heavily against him as he scrambled for the railing. Steve was huge and perfect and beautiful, and touching him was like having a full chorus of angels singing straight to Bucky’s dick. Steve made a choked-off noise into Bucky’s mouth, pushing back, and Bucky grinned and skimmed his hands under Steve’s shirt, hitching closer and dragging his fingertips over Steve’s ribs. 

Bucky was filthy from whatever he’d been doing before landing himself on the medical floor, he was dressed like a mental patient, and he was pretty sure his shoes were the kind that would disintegrate if you walked through a puddle, but Steve didn’t seem to mind. Bucky wasn’t sure if he normally wore underwear, but he sure wasn’t now, and with only the scrubs between him and the seam of Steve’s athletic sweats he was very happy with the idea of never putting any on ever again. 

“You feel amazing,” Bucky murmured into Steve’s skin, rolling his hips and pressing a deep groan out of Steve. Steve didn’t seem to have cleaned up much after whatever the accident was, either, and when Bucky tugged his ear in his teeth he could taste dust and sweat. He ran his fingers down Steve’s inseams, got a solid grip, and hefted Steve up onto the handrail that ran around the width of the mirrored walls. Steve’s knees went up and around his waist, and the solid weight of him as Bucky settled between his thighs was familiar and lewd. It must have been muscle memory, because there was no way he would have consciously decided he could take that bulk that easily, but he was damn glad he’d tried it.

Steve tried to say something and completely failed at it, and Bucky dragged the hem of Steve’s shirt up to his shoulders to get at those amazing tits underneath. “Christ,” Bucky gasped, feeling the length of Steve’s dick hard against his, reveling in the stuttering gasp of Steve’s breath in his chest, “how do we get dressed in the morning? We’re not leaving our bedroom for a week. I want to taste every part of you _twice_.”

“I love you,” Steve gasped, arching into him, and really, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Of course Steve loved him. Bucky had only really known him for a matter of hours, but he already knew Steve was that kind of guy: earnest, open, adoring. He felt warmer, and he couldn’t help the stupid smile he hid biting Steve’s shoulder. “Buck, I love you.”

It had only caused a slight hitch in Bucky’s rhythm, but it was apparently enough for Steve to remember they were sixty seconds from semi-public sex in That Asshole Tony’s elevator.

“Bucky,” Steve managed around another gasp, fingers automatically running through Bucky’s hair, “wait, hold on—”

“That jackass stuck me with needles all day, I think he can handle us necking in here for the time it takes to get a few floors up,” Bucky assured him, licking a stripe up his neck and behind Steve’s ear. “I have years’ worth of loud, enthusiastic sex to catch back up on and I want to get a start on all of it right now. Jesus,” he moaned, “every part of you is perfect, I want my mouth on all of it, I want—”

“Bucky,” Steve huffed, shaking his head and trying to get a grip, “Buck, you just woke up, we should—”

“Stevie,” Bucky managed, almost cross-eyed with lust, “Stevie, I swear, both I and my ass are 100 percent hale and healthy and ready to ride you like a—”

“Bucky, _wait_.” Steve pushed back suddenly, almost falling on his ass when Bucky realized he didn’t mean ‘wait till our floor’ but ‘stop right now’ and backed immediately away. Steve’s eyes were squeezed shut and his breathing was still heavy, but he held Bucky at arms length.

There was an absurdly cheerful _ding!_ as the elevator opened on their floor. Neither of them moved.

“The only reason you noticed anyone else in that room was because they were talking about me.” Bucky’s voice was still husky; he cleared his throat and tried again. “You said we’ve been together forever. You were telling everyone in the room how much sex we have and a second ago we were ready to—We were about to—there is no way I am reading you wrong.”

Steve shook his head. “You don’t even know me.” The elevator started to slide shut again, and Steve jerked away and caught the door before it closed. “No one else in that room backed up our relationship at all—I could be lying to you and you would never—”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” Bucky hissed, “I know you, I knew you last time, I—”

“But you don’t even remember last time—”

“Of course I remember last time!” Bucky shouted, and they both froze. Bucky frowned. “Or. I think I remember—I mean, I did remember…” He trailed off. “Shit,” he said, realization dawning, sick and awful, “Shit, I have no idea, do I? I don’t actually know you.”

Steve’s smile was genuine, but pained. He took another deep breath, as if to steel himself, then gave a short nod. “Let’s…Let’s just get inside for now. I’ll get you some water.” His breathing, like Bucky’s, hadn’t quite evened out, but when he slid out of the elevator and held his hand up against the palm reader, it apparently wasn’t the type to check for signs of distress. The light turned green, and Steve pushed through the heavily reinforced door. 

Steve slumped against the wall as he pulled off the heavy boots he was wearing—what _had_ they been doing before they ended up on the medical floor? –and rubbed his temples. Bucky fought the sudden urge to do it for him.

“Look,” Bucky reasoned as he followed him inside, toeing off the flimsy medical shoes. “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I don’t want anything you don’t. But if you’re in, I am definitely up for getting naked together, and I don’t need to make wild guesses about why it’s so easy for me to trust you. I’m pretty secure in the assumption that you’re right about my wanting to bone you when I’m normal, too, so I don’t see what the problem is.”

“I don’t actually know if you’d have wanted to, to… bone, is the thing,” Steve admitted, shamefaced. He rubbed the back of his neck as he opened the cupboard and pulled out two glasses. “I think… we were still fighting, actually. We’ve been fighting. It was…” Steve sighed. “We had kind of a big one right before we left for that Hydra compound.”

Bucky was quiet. Whatever a Hydra compound was, if it ended in medical equipment, it probably wasn’t for fun. Leaving angry before something like that wasn't a good sign. “I’m not mad now,” he offered, softly, but he knew when the discussion was over. He shuffled into the open seating space attached to the kitchen and fell onto the couch.

Steve shrugged and pulled a pitcher of water out of the refrigerator. “I’d rather err on the side of not taking advantage of you, Buck.” He brought a glass of water over to Bucky, and they sat awkwardly on opposite ends of the furniture for a while. 

“Sorry about Tony,” Steve said after a while. “He’s…he has a lot of reasons behind the way he’s acting, and none of ‘em are actually about you. I’m…” He sighed, running a finger along the seam of the couch. “I don’t think it’s good for him. Us being here.”

Bucky waited for him to continue, but Steve lapsed back into quietly staring at the upholstery. 

It lasted for much too long. Bucky squirmed a little, slumping, trying to get situated, before it got to be too much and he had to break the silence. “What were we fighting about?” he asked, rocking his glass on his chest. The couch was surprisingly uncomfortable for how expensive it looked. He edged sideways.

Steve groaned. “I’m an idiot. You want me to do things I’m not good at doing. It’s a theme.” He slouched down and rubbed his eyes. “If you want to know I can tell you about it, but…I’d really rather not spend the evening explaining why you’re mad and I’m a screwup, honestly.”

Bucky shrugged. “Yeah, okay.” He stretched his foot out to shove Steve in the hip. Steve gave him a watery smile back. “Hey. No sex. That’s cool. I’m sure we get up to all kinds of fun things when we’re not defiling every room in Tony’s building. Got any cards?”

Steve got a weird look on his face that said very clearly that there wasn’t a lot of time they spent with clothes on.

“Really?” Bucky set the water glass down. “Really? Wow. I’m impressed with the both of us. No wonder I have this amazing muscle definition,” he mused, lifting up his shirt and checking himself out. “I probably get it from sucking your dick all day long. Hey,” Bucky perked up and leaned forward. Steve’s eyes were glued to Bucky’s waist, and he took pity on the poor guy and tugged his shirt back down. Steve’s eyes snapped, embarrassed, up to his again. “Am I amazing? Do I actually keep up, or do I have to take a quick catnap in between? You seem like you could go a while.”

“Uh,” Steve managed, going completely red-faced again. “I just. You had been getting so much better and it had been so long—and then we both had the serum and that makes things really—it just makes it really hard not to—and you look _really nice_ with your hair long, so we just…”

Steve was looking increasingly panicked, and Bucky felt his eyebrows go up and his mouth curl at the corners. Saving Steve from his awkward romantic flailing felt like it was probably one of the things he spent most of his time on, but it was endearing to watch him flounder, too. 

“I _do_ look really good with this hair,” Bucky agreed, finally taking pity on Steve and pulling a few strands of it forward. Steve took a relieved breath, his speeding mortification train effectively derailed. “I must use something really expensive on it too, because this shit doesn’t just happen on its own. I’ve been in a hospital gurney all day, and I saw myself in the mirrors in the elevator. People don’t look this good after the time I’ve had without some serious product.” 

“It’s not the hair, Buck,” Steve said, still smiling.

“Right,” Bucky agreed, nodding and tucking the hair back into its ponytail. It fell back in his face and he blew at it, annoyed but oddly satisfied that it hung in a perfect smooth curve. “It’s the product, that's what I’m saying.”

“Bucky,” Steve reached forward and tucked the strand of hair back himself, then got a weird look and moved back to his own side. “You don’t need any help being beautiful.”

Bucky blinked. “You are _wrong_ ,” he assured Steve, but there was no way he was sitting a full brunch-meeting-the-folks three feet apart after that. He was fairly sure that if someone like Steve was this into him, then even in the middle of the worst fights he’d have to be fine with shit like blankets and cocoa and footrubs. They didn’t need to have their cocks in each other. 

If Steve let him, he was going to cuddle the shit out of him, but whatever was supporting the damn cushions jabbed him square in the dick when he tried to lean forward. He frowned.

Later, Bucky could honestly not have said who had been more surprised. Steve, when Bucky tried to adjust the cushion and ripped his hand through several sturdy millimeters of wool herringbone upholstery fabric before headbutting Captain America right in the balls, or Bucky, when he fell off sideways while pulling three handguns and a rifle from between his legs, then landed ass first on the attached bayonet.

“SON OF A—” Bucky shouted, pulling the bayonet out of his cheek with a shocked grunt. “What the fuck, Steve? _What the fuck_?”

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Steve was on his knees and grabbing Bucky’s ass, but it was significantly less erotic than Bucky had been planning it. “Buck, you’re bleeding!”

“ _Why do you have firearms in your couch cushions?_ ” Bucky shouted, yanking down his ruined scrubs to inspect the wound. It didn't seem like it was very deep, but fuck. What the fuck? _What the fuck_?

Steve, on the other hand, seemed torn between concern and gleeful laughter. “I told you it was a terrible hiding place. I told you even a civilian would know something was wrong,” he announced, delighted. “I said, ‘even a civilian with a traumatic brain injury would know a couch isn’t supposed to feel like that, Buck.’ And I was _right_.”

“I got a bayonet up my _ass_ and you are _gloating_ about it? I take back every nice thing I ever said about you!” Bucky was bleeding a lot and it had started itching like crazy. He squirmed, rubbing at his asscheek.

“You hide this shit _all over the apartment_ ,” Steve told him, slapping him on the back. “You tried to stash a machete in the _shower_ , this is your damn chickens coming home to roost. Don’t be such a baby, it’ll heal in an hour or two. Let’s get you cleaned up so you don’t drip on anything.”

“I’m going to wear your favorite pajamas and bleed all over them,” Bucky told him, allowing himself to be towed towards what was presumably the bathroom. “And before that I’m going to use all your shampoo.”

“Don't worry,” Steve said breezily, “I’ll just lie and you’ll end up bleeding on your own pajamas.”

Bucky twisted his face up and narrowed his eyes. “You’re a monster.”

“I’m your monster,” Steve said, and kissed him on the nose.

***

Bucky was washed, stitched up, wearing what were probably his own pajama pants, and completely dead to the world in bed with Steve when a group of men dressed in dark armored stealth gear rappelled through the window.

It was _extremely_ jarring to wake up next to the most beautiful man in the world, warm and soft and everything Bucky had ever wanted, and suddenly have broken glass and semi-automatics everywhere. Bucky’s reaction was knee-jerk; he didn’t even think about it. In a moment, he’d swiped up a shard of glass with his metal arm, ripped off the faceplate of whichever grunt was closest and stabbed it through his eye. He kicked another shard up, grabbed it mid-air, and disemboweled the one coming from behind him. 

He was about five mysterious black-clad assassins in and covered in way more blood than clothes when something in his head said _what the fuck are you doing_ and he froze.

Holy shit.

 _Holy shit_.

Luckily, Steve seemed to have held his own, none of the attackers were moving, and people he recognized were racing through the door. Natasha stopped as soon as she saw everything else had stopped, eyes darting in wide sweeps as she took in the room. Tony, on the other hand, stood gaping for a moment before making angry, wordless noises and pointing at a particularly large bloodstain crushed into the drywall next to the headboard. Then there was a lot of shouting, so no one seemed to notice when Bucky stumbled back against a wall and started hyperventilating.

“Steve,” Stark was saying, looking aghast, “you’re letting him rub off on you _way_ too much, and I’m not even making an innuendo here, even though I _want_ to. Look at this! Look at this.” He gestured to the first assailant Bucky had stabbed, and Bucky felt his stomach twist. He covered his mouth. “Through the _eye_ Steve? Through the eye. There is blood _everywhere_. This is still actually _my_ place, you realize. You’ve just trashed _my_ place.”

“You said it was _our_ place,” Steve shot back, gesturing at the no-shit-blood-drenched room, draped with dead bodies, holy _shit_ , “you said we could come back and work things out and it would be _our_ space, so if we want to paint it with the blood of our enemies, I don’t see why you have a problem with it!” 

“This is the argument you’re going with,” Natasha managed, sounding at once distracted yet deeply disappointed. She padded over to the smashed window and poked her head out, looking up along the outer wall.

“You don’t need to recreate the Shining in it!” Stark yelled, stomping heavily over to the remains of the bedside lamp. About half of it was sticking out of the head of one of the goons. Tony was wearing some sort of metal suit, Bucky realized slowly, which explained the mechanical whirring noise as he talked—everything he said was at least 50% wild gestures. Bucky stared at him. “Did you smash the plate when one of your depression-neighbors brought you a cracker pie? Did you? The assumption is you get the pie plate _back_ , Steve!”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Bucky managed, still tracking the waving metal arms and general viscera and not much else. “Oh god, I’m going to be sick. I didn’t. I just.” He took another huge, gasping breath. “I’ve never. I don’t know what happened.”

“Wait,” Stark paused. “You did this? We tested this. You didn’t keep the killing stuff last time we talked.” Natasha ducked back inside, eyebrows drawn together.

“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Bucky said softly, fighting the bile rising in his throat. “I’ve never—I stabbed him in the _face_.” He swallowed, and he could barely get it out. “I’ve never killed anyone before.” 

He looked up, then, into Steve’s blank face and Tony’s shocked one, and said, “Oh my god. I have. I keep weapons all over the apartment and I don’t think twice before disemboweling someone with a window. I’ve killed people, haven’t I? This isn’t the first time.”

Steve looked heartbroken, but he didn’t look like Bucky was wrong.

“You kill people every day, Hannibal,” Stark said after a pause. “It’s what murderers do. They kill people.”

“ _Tony_ ,” Steve thundered, and Bucky sprinted for the toilet. Steve and Tony continued their shouting match behind him.

He threw up his _tonsils_. Every time he thought he was done, he saw the shard of glass through someone’s Jesus Christ actual eyeball and he lost control of his stomach again. Who did that? Who was so used to stabbing people in the _eyeball_ that it was _muscle memory_? 

His vision swam and he tried to heave everything up again.

In a few more coughs he was down to aching, empty retching, and he slumped sideways against the cupboards under the sink.

“You get used to it,” Natasha said, sitting on the lip of the bathtub.

Bucky jolted across half the bathroom with a sound like a terrified Chihuahua breathing helium. His arm actually went right through the counter with a splintering crunch and shattered the tiles under the towel rack, and he scrambled back in horror, eyes wide and glued to Natasha.

“Breathe,” She told him.

“How am I supposed to _breathe_?” he managed, wedging himself into the corner, and he felt the drywall give against his back. “I get _used_ to it? How do you get _used_ to it? I can still feel—” his teeth clacked together, hard, as he worked to keep from dry heaving at the thought of bones breaking under his—

“Well.” Natasha tipped her head to the side and didn’t try to smile. “For people like us… getting used to it is a lot better than the alternative.”

Bucky felt like he was going to throw up again.

“Buck!” Steve skidded into the bathroom, and really, that man should not have been able to fit. Sure, it was a big bathroom, but Bucky was already there and not a small guy. Steve was _enormous_ in the enclosed space, those ridiculous shoulders of his knocking the shelving near the door completely off its moorings without even slowing him down. He dropped to his knees in a cascade of soaps, towels and detergents, pulled Bucky into his huge arms, and pretty effectively blocked out everything in the entire world simply by being big and in the way.

Thank fucking god.

Bucky felt his breathing start to slow and even out, and the muscles in his stomach stopped shaking and clenching. He swallowed, hard, and tried to concentrate on the way Steve smelled. He’d taken a shower, too, and he smelled like the lavender shampoo he’d used. Bucky had been fairly certain it was actually his. He tried to concentrate on that, on the vague annoyance and hesitant satisfaction he’d felt when Steve had come to bed to hold him close and promise the amnesia and confusion was going to be temporary.

“Quit wrecking my stuff!” That Asshole Tony yelled at them from the doorway, and Bucky’s concentration shattered. Steve moved away enough to stare in incredulous fury. Bucky pulled Steve back and buried his face in his shirt. “There isn’t even anyone in the bathroom! You don’t need to go around breaking all of it!”

“Get _out_ , Tony,” Steve yelled, but his grip on Bucky tightened. With his eyes closed, Bucky could almost pretend nothing was happening.

Almost. He could hear Natasha breezing across the room, the quiet murmur of her voice, and the sound of the mechanics in Tony’s suit making it shuffle awkwardly on the hardwood of the hallway as she pulled him away.

“He’s not,” Tony hissed, and Bucky worked as hard as he could not to hear, but it wasn’t working. Natasha hissed something back. “He kills people _all the time_ , how am I supposed to be sensitive about that? How is that going to faze him when he’s barely noticed he’s _missing an arm_?”

“Hey.” Steve’s voice pulled him back, and Bucky could hear the plates on his shoulder joint clicking and recalibrating down to his fingertips. Jesus, he did have a metal arm. He hadn’t even thought about it. Was that normal? How could that be normal? “Hey. Look at me. You’re here. You’re safe. I’m with you.”

“This is what we’re fighting about,” Bucky realized, his stomach in knots and his arm running through some kind of diagnostic; it just kept snapping open and shut in a long ripple up and down the length of it. “We’re fighting because my fun side hobby is slicing people up into stir fry. I’m Ted Bundy’s cyborg cousin.”

“No,” Steve said, giving his shoulders a shake, but Bucky couldn’t look at him. This wasn’t the sort of thing you could just agree to disagree on. You couldn’t fix this. “ _No_. That isn’t you. No one can make you do that anymore.”

“You make him do that all the _time_ ,” Tony protested from the hallway, and there was a sharp clang, followed by more shouting.

“Tony,” Natasha said, “I need you focused. Get Friday to figure out how no one noticed ten full grown men in riot gear until they were breaking through windows that can take a direct hit from your suit. Steve, I expect the two of you to be in the guest apartments in an hour so I can get this cleaned up, but I can be flexible. Take the time James needs.” 

“They couldn’t have climbed up from street level,” Tony muttered, already distracted from Bucky in favor of the nearest problem. “Traffic stopped for days and assholes were yelling ‘jump’ out of the next high rise over last time someone tried that. Even at night someone would have noticed and turned it into a spectacle.”

“God Bless New York,” Natasha agreed, deadpan, and gave him a push down the hall. Stark moved absently, talking to himself about security protocols and backdoors as he clanked his way out. 

The front door clicked shut behind them, and Steve took Bucky’s face in his hands. “I have never, nor will I ever, get in a fight with you because I blame you for your past,” he assured him, voice sincere and emphatic. He was biting his lip, and his gaze flicked between Bucky’s eyes. “Tony is right. Some people hurt you and used you and forced you to do some terrible things, and now sometimes you use the skills you got from them to help me stop them.” Bucky stared at him, and whatever was in his face was breaking Steve’s heart. Steve swallowed and tried again. “But it wasn’t your choice, Buck. You’re not like that.”

Bucky laughed, hollow, and shook his head. “I’m clearly like that.” 

“No—”

“Steve.” Bucky gestured to the bedroom; his stomach gave a rebellious jolt and the swallowed, hard. “I just slaughtered five fully armed men, half naked and armed with some broken glass off the floor. I am _clearly like that_.”

Steve looked at him and bit his lip again, which at any other time would send very insistent messages straight to the prime directive in Bucky’s pants, but at the moment made him feel uncomfortably unworthy of Steve’s regard. It was familiar somehow, despite the amnesia.

“I took out half of those guys, too.” Steve pulled Bucky back in, arms tight, and Bucky was too selfish to act on the nagging insecurities. He let him. “I kill just as many people as you do. Shit, I’m way ahead at this point. I blew three helicarriers out of the air after I found you. That’s, what, 6,000 people on each? Roughly? I did it in an afternoon.”

The nagging insecurities were _clearly right_. Bucky jerked back, jaw agape as he stared at Steve. “I know you are trying to be supportive, and I appreciate it,” Bucky managed, horrified. “But it is oddly not helpful that we are having murder competitions instead of couple bonding time.”

“No, no,” Steve assured him, palms up and placating, “they were bad guys.”

“ _18,000 people were bad guys?_ ”

Steve looked like he was trying to stop talking and couldn’t, hands moving up to his mouth and back down in anxious twitches. “I mean, I made a PA announcement beforehand. So everybody who wasn’t a bad guy didn’t get on.”

“ _You made a PA announcement_.”

Steve gave up and dropped his head back against the shattered remains of their bathroom shelving. One of the few bottles left standing jumped and toppled over. "I did way better at that PA announcement than I’m doing right now. That was one of my best speeches.”

“Well I sure fucking hope so!” Bucky croaked. His hands weren’t shaking anymore, though, and the incessant clicking in his arm had stopped. “How are you this consistently awful at calming me down? How come it keeps _working_?”

“Sam has a theory that it stimulates the frustrated mother hen response in you,” Steve told the ceiling. 

“Oh my god, Rogers.” Bucky said, laughter taking on a tight note, rubbing his face and pulling his hair back a little more firmly than he might have in other circumstances. “You are a _mess_.”

Steve had his eyes closed, but his mouth curled slightly. “Your mess. I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“Yes, you do,” Bucky huffed, closing his eyes tightly, and opened them again. “Okay. Come on, mess, let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I don’t.” Steve smiled and let himself be manhandled into the shower. Bucky tried not to look at the blood all over the both of them as anything but a problem he needed to solve. He turned on the spray and adjusted the temperature. “But I’m glad you do.”

“You can’t pull off sweet when you have someone else’s blood up your nose,” Bucky said sternly, and jabbed him in the face with a wet washcloth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now I would like you to go back and imagine this entire chapter with the theme from Moana running loudly behind it, because that is my experience while writing it.
> 
> I have a three year old. I may have mentioned this a FEW times.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so every time I write the chapters just blossom and what i thought was gonna be 4 chapters mayyyyybbeeeeee has become at least 6 (I know because I have about 4 1/2 already mostly written) and possibly 7. So. Uh. Sorry?
> 
> I am considering keeping a running count of dick jokes in this story. If you have been keeping track please let me know.

Steve was snoring. 

Bucky rolled over, squinting in the light from the window. Steve had an impressive set of lungs, but not, apparently, very good nasal passages. The snore was really just amazing, both in volume and variety, and it rose and fell before stopping just long enough for Bucky to relax… then returned suddenly at full force. Bucky tried covering his head with the pillow and moving to the far end of the bed.

Steve sniffed, looped an arm around Bucky’s waist, and to Bucky’s alarm somehow slid him effortlessly back across the sheets to snug up against him again. Steve gave a satisfied grunt, then went right back to buzzsawing redwoods.

This time twice as loud, and directly into Bucky’s ear.

“Steve, you’re snoring,” Bucky mumbled, burying his face in the pillow. There was no response. “Steve,” he huffed, shoving him with his foot, but Steve just pulled him closer. Ugh. Bucky prodded him sharply with an elbow. “STEVE.”

Steve opened his mouth and fucking _licked Bucky’s face_.

Bucky Barnes kicked the light and love of his life right the fuck out of the goddamn bed. Steve fell with a crash and brought the covers with him, laughing—great, heaving whoops that left him breathless and near tears. 

Bucky was _not amused_. “You asshole!” he shouted, crashing down on top of Steve and trying to smother him with the pillow. Steve didn’t even flinch, just wrapped his arms helplessly around Bucky and kept right on giggling through the down stuffing. “You _asshole_ , I was sleeping _so well_. I was dreaming about your _ass_ in _tights_! What is wrong with you?”

“I haven’t snored since 1941,” Steve wheezed. 

“I have _amnesia_ ,” Bucky yelled, wrangling Steve into a headlock and grinding his knuckles into his scalp. “You took advantage of a _trauma patient with amnesia_.”

Steve apparently found this hilarious. He somehow nuzzled up around the pillow and buried his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck, still giggling and snorting like a goddamn hyena, the traitor.

“Don’t think you can win me over with cuddles and giggles, because you can’t,” Bucky lied. “I don’t find this cute at all.” Steve ignored him and kissed him under the ear, and _hello_ , but then he flipped Bucky off of him and jumped to his feet. Bucky groaned, trying to smother himself with the pillow this time. 

“I’m thinking pancakes. Are you thinking pancakes?” Steve asked, stretching. Bucky made miserable noises through the pillow. “Maybe a run after.”

“I’m thinking maybe another hour or two of sleep. Did I know you were this obnoxious in the morning before I started sleeping with you?” Bucky asked. “Because I feel like that should have factored into the decision.”

“Pancakes,” Steve decided, and bounced up on a mission.

***

Bucky had no idea if it was weird that Natasha was there when he finally dragged himself into clothes and stumbled his way into the main living area. It seemed weird, though.

Steve was also acting weird. As far as Bucky could tell, he was trying to hide from Natasha while staying in the same room, shoulders up and hyperfocused on the pot of oatmeal he had bubbling on the stove. It smelled like he’d added peanut butter, maybe some dried fruit. Bucky’s mouth watered as he suddenly realized he was ravenous despite eating his way through half Steve’s pantry the night before.

What was definitely weird was how Natasha seemed to be having a full conversation with Steve without using a single word.

“No,” Steve admitted, looking like a little kid caught with his hand in a jar of cookies. “I haven’t talked to him about his memories.”

Natasha just stood mutely, staring at Steve with absolutely no expression at all.

“He doesn’t need the worry,” Steve protested, scooping oatmeal into a bowl. It was bigger than Bucky’s head. There was already a stack of pancakes on the table, golden-brown and wafting steam through the kitchen. “There’s no reason to get into it. He’s happy!” But whatever Steve was trying to argue, his body language said he was guilty as hell. He was shifting from foot to foot, his head drooping, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets as soon as he passed breakfast to Bucky. 

Natasha didn’t even twitch.

“It’s not about me!” Steve protested, pulling his hands free and spreading them, exasperated. “It’s _not_. Nat, look at him!” Steve gestured, and they both turned to look at Bucky.

Bucky had been in the middle of cramming a heaping spoonful of oatmeal and peanut butter into his maw. “Mlrg?” he managed around it, his tongue glued to the sticky mass. 

Natasha managed to stay blank faced yet somehow completely unimpressed.

Steve gave her a look that said _see?_ , but apparently Natasha wasn’t buying any of what he was trying to sell. Steve held his ground for a moment longer, then deflated and rubbed his mouth. “You’re right,” he conceded, sagging into the bar stool next to Bucky. Bucky worked on swallowing the oatmeal, since it looked like he was maybe going to be expected to contribute soon. Could he get away with just staring at Steve, too? That would be ideal, if he could pull it off with his mouth full. He snuck another bite. It was tough, chewing with that much crammed in, but Bucky persisted.

Natasha pulled another stool up opposite, rolling her eyes in grudgingly fond disgust. 

“I am so hungry,” Bucky managed in apology, waving his spoon at her in vague circles. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungry in my life.” It mostly came out as a garbled mess, though. Natasha screwed up her face in response, then turned to stare at Steve again. 

“Of course I haven’t told him we’re superheroes and we heal by eating the yearly output of a family farm in one day,” Steve said, exasperated. “When would it have come up?”

“ _Glurb?_ ” Bucky choked.

Natasha looked like she was amazed they’d made it out of bed on their own. “I am trying so hard to stay out of this discussion,” she said at last, “but you two are a tragedy. You are a super-serumed, scientifically perfected tragedy.”

Steve looked honestly ashamed of himself. Bucky punched him in the arm a little, and Steve dredged up a half-hearted smile for him. “You’re doing great,” Bucky finally managed, working the last of the oatmeal away from his teeth. “You’re doing fine, pal. Whatever it this is about, you can just tell me now.”

Bucky hadn’t realized before how tense Natasha had been, but she unwound a notch at that. “Hm,” she murmured, and Bucky could swear she looked surprised.

“ _See_ ,” Steve demanded, gesturing emphatically. Natasha’s mouth twisted and she nodded her head, conceding something.

Bucky leaned on the counter. “I have no idea what is going on, baby,” he said around the spoon. “You lost me at superheroes and serum enhancements. And Stevie, I’m not sure what silent brain language you two are using, but it ain’t English. I’m guessing we haven’t sent away for penis injections?”

Steve paused. “You didn’t keep my name,” he said, wondering. “But you somehow retained old email spam for growing your johnson.”

“Don’t get sore about it,” Bucky told him. “I think about my johnson a lot.”

“We both do,” Steve agreed, then realized what he’s said in front of company, snapped his head up to gape at Natasha, and went bright red. 

Natasha bit her lip, then sighed, looking torn. “You’re right. This is good for you both,” she said softly, “but it’s not kind, Steve, and it’s not your choice to make. Anyway, you can either explain now, or let Tony bring it up while you and I are off ripping secrets from Hydra.” Steve winced, and Natasha’s eyes were sympathetic. “I’ll let you get to it.”

“Natasha, wait,” Steve said, half standing and reaching for her. “Stay. You can—I’m not good at—”

Bucky had no idea how he saw it; maybe it was something he’d had in him before the accident. Natasha looked hurt, just a flash of it, before it smoothed over. She blew out a breath, then tilted her head at them. “Oh Steve,” she said. “You never ask for easy things, do you?”

“Wait,” Steve said, “no. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“It’s okay.” Natasha glided back, graceful and soft, and Bucky couldn’t say what about it repelled him. He sat up straighter, and beside him, Steve did too. “You’re right. You’re not good at hurting people.”

“ _No_ ,” Steve said vehemently, his face set like stone. “That is not what I meant. I’ve got this.”

Natasha stilled, watching him, and then she… relaxed. It was subtle, and contradictory, since what she did was lose the softness. She shed some of the grace and went slightly cooler – but not cold. The warmth that remained was somehow different. 

“How about I go pick up more food,” she offered, glancing at Bucky’s bowl—it was completely scraped clean. “Give you two some time, and then come back.”

Steve relaxed a bit, too. “Yeah,” he agreed, leaning on the bar. “That sounds good. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Natasha said, standing and pushing her chair in. “Good luck.” She kissed Steve on the cheek, quick, and left.

Bucky watched as the door closed behind her. He let all his breath out in one long huff. “Okay. Wow. How bad is it?”

“Well,” Steve said heavily, sitting back down at the breakfast bar and giving Bucky his full attention. “You’ve guessed you’ve got some kind of brain damage. That part’s not hard to work out.”

“No,” Bucky said. “The part where I forgot your name despite being completely and clearly bananas for you gave me no hints about that at all.” Steve didn’t smile, and Bucky took a deep breath. “Come on, Stevie. Don’t worry about lead up. Just give it to me.”

“Yeah.” Steve said, closing his eyes. “Yeah. Okay. You got _this_ brain damage because three days ago you were helping us take out a Nazi stronghold in Georgia. It was a trap, and it was probably a trap set for you, specifically. They poured maybe half of what they had left after we hit them last into stabbing unidentifiable electronics behind your ear. Tony’s pretty sure it was trying to copy over your memories, though.”

Bucky blinked. “Nazi stronghold,” he repeated. “We just, on a weekday with nothing to do, attacked a Nazi stronghold in Georgia. And they stuck a flash drive in my brain.”

Steve nodded.

“Oh man,” Bucky realized. “Oh man. I panicked and ripped it back out, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Steve admitted.

“Okay,” Bucky said, considering. “Well. At least I’m not _completely_ different when I have my memories intact. That’s good.” Steve got a weird look on his face, and Bucky’s stomach sank. “You said _this_ brain damage, though. There’s more to this.”

Steve leaned in and put his hands on either side of Bucky’s face. “You are a hero,” Steve said gently, “and I love you. You are the best man I have ever met, and you are who I measure myself against in every decision I make. What happened was not your fault.”

“Oh hell,” Bucky said. “This is the bad part, isn’t it.”

***

Bucky was _not wrong_.

***

“Hey.”

Bucky blinked, caught wrong footed. Tony’s magic tower had suggested he try the roof, since he apparently went there a lot when he was upset, but he hadn’t expected Natasha to be around already. She was ripping apart some sort of heavily damaged vehicle— it had obviously been in a fight. Fuck, maybe even the fight that landed Bucky in this shitshow. 

And it was a _shitshow_. He couldn’t even look at Steve. He’d had to get out. Now here he was: eyes red and puffy, probably smelling of vomit _again_ , throat raw from shouting at Steve when he’d said _it was okay, he had a healing factor, he_ —

No.

“Sorry,” Bucky said, already turning. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No, come on up,” she interrupted, elbows deep in circuitry. She sat back in her clearly designer boots, contemplating the insides of—was it a hovercraft? “I take it the talk didn’t go well.”

Bucky laughed, but it came out sounding desperate. He dropped to the ground beside the door and ran his hands through his hair. The left one hadn’t bothered him before, but now he flinched when he felt it. “You could say that. I knew I’d done some shit, but. _Fuck_. I don’t know how…I was….” Bucky clenched his eyes shut. “I did some seriously _fucked up shit_.”

“Mm. No.” Natasha peered inside and rummaged around. 

“I did,” Bucky said, more sure this time. “I beat _Steve_ half to death. I’m out of my mind in love with him and I beat him half to death even though he had _super serum_. And Stark, _Jesus_. And you! I shot someone right _through_ you. You didn’t even _matter_ , you were—”

“I met Sam’s sister the other day,” Natasha interrupted, apropos of nothing, and Bucky blinked.

“Uh—”

Natasha yanked, hard, and came out with a few wires. “She brought her baby with her and asked me to hold it for a second.” She frowned. “Like I know anything about babies. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I kind of held it above my head and just stared at it until it did something.” She twisted a few things together and the machine jerked once, then gargled its way to a soft hum and rose a few inches into the air. Natasha dusted off her hands and tapped her chin. 

“Little snot kicked me right in the face,” she told him, mouth curling up. “I’ll probably have to return the favor as soon as I get it alone.”

The hovercraft was surprisingly similar to a jetski with a gas pedal. Natasha shoved it, and it rocked slightly instead of skimming along like an air hockey puck. She gave it an impressed frown, eyebrows up and arms crossed.

Bucky opened his mouth, closed it. Tried again. “I don’t know what to address first. That you’re suggesting you plan to kick a baby in the face, that you’re comparing being shot through the gut to an infant kicking you in the chin, or that you are comparing the Winter Soldier, the man who shot you in the gut, to a baby. That kicked you in the face.”

Natasha shrugged. “I wouldn’t kick her in the face until she’s older,” she pointed out. “Eleven at least. I’m not a monster.”

“I…You…”

She cocked her head. “You don’t think I should? What about the two year old that bit me during glad-handing last week? I should have bit back.”

“ _I get it_ ,” Bucky ground out. “I am the baby. This is a metaphor. _I get it_.”

“Were a baby,” she corrected, swinging a leg over the hovercraft and revving the engine. It hummed slightly louder than before, and she looked at it like it was personally responsible for cramping her style. Then she turned back to him and patted the seat behind her. “You’re better now. You were also the two year old, if that makes you feel any happier.”

“No,” Bucky growled, climbing up behind her when she waved him on. “It doesn’t.”

“Hm.” She shrugged. “Oh, well. Hang on,” she told him, and floored it. The hovercraft shot across the roof, and Bucky yelped and grabbed her. She laughed, and the craft dipped as it left the tower and hit air, making Bucky turn green and shut his eyes. After a moment though, Natasha’s delight obvious in her stance, he opened an eye.

Flying a hovercraft through Manhattan was pretty nice, but what made him smile was the look on Natasha’s face when she glanced back, grinning wide. Something quiet inside told him she didn’t do it that often.

He felt the smile grow. 

Natasha nodded and gunned it. “Let’s go pick Steve up some Thai,” she hollered over the wind, and Bucky settled in closer so he didn’t fall off.

***

Steve was sitting alone in the dark in the guest apartments when they got back, like some kind of sparkly vampiric drama queen.

Natasha had the same blank, unimpressed face she’d worn earlier when Steve scrambled to turn the lights on and look like he’d been a reasonable grownup while Bucky had been gone. Steve sputtered for a second, then gave in and dropped back onto the couch.

“Hey babe,” Bucky said, and Steve perked up at his tone. “We got you some pad thai.”

“We _bought_ you fresh rolls, golden noodles and fried rice, too,” Natasha added. “But someone got hungry on the way back even though we ate at the restaurant.”

“I am a growing boy,” Bucky defended himself. “A growing, superheroic boy. Fixing brain trauma is apparently calorie intensive work.”

“Pad thai sounds amazing,” Steve assured them, standing to take it. He took the chopsticks, too, but after opening them just poked at the food in awkward silence. “Did you…” he glanced up at Bucky. “Do you…how are you feeling?”

“Quit fucking around with your noodles and kiss me,” Bucky ordered, and immediately had a double armful of desperately relieved super soldier trying to crawl inside his jacket. “Hey, hey, Stevie,” he managed around the superstrength liplock Steve planted on him. “It’s okay. I came back. It’s okay.”

“I was worried about you,” Steve muttered, but his grip eased. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I freaked out,” Bucky murmured, curling his fingers through Steve’s hair. It still felt as amazing as the first time. Which was, admittedly, only yesterday. “But I calmed down. We’re good.”

“I love you,” Steve said, sliding to his side and hooking an arm around his waist. “I-- _Hey_.”

Bucky startled, then followed Steve’s irritated gaze to Natasha.

“You weren’t eating it,” she said, her mouth full of pad thai. “I need to get my strength up. I’m going after Hydra tonight.”

“ _With me_ ,” Steve corrected, snatching the takeout container back. “You’re going to rout out a Hydra base _with me_.”

“Right,” Natasha said. “I’m going to rout out a Hydra base with you, and I need to keep my strength up.”

Bucky must have made some sort of noise, because they both turned to him with vaguely concerned looks on their faces. Steve’s brow furrowed further and he set everything down to pull Bucky back into a hug. “It’ll be okay, Buck, we’re just going to go find out more about what they’re trying to do. We’ve done this a million times, we’re really good at it.” He let Bucky go enough to look him in the face. “We’re not worried. See, Natasha is even stealing my pad thai again.”

“We’re superheroes, James.” Natasha patted him on the metal arm, then ate a piece of tofu. “This is basically just Tuesday for us. We’ll be fine.”

“Steve forgot how to brush his teeth this morning when I dropped trou to get in the shower,” Bucky pointed out, dubious.

“Well, we’re not bringing you with us, are we,” Natasha said.

“Anyway you don’t usually flash me during raids in Hydra bases,” Steve agreed. “Although fair point, it would really distract me if you did.”

“Seriously, we will be fine,” Natasha assured Bucky, polishing off the last of the noodles and tossing out the container. Steve gazed at the trashcan, forlorn. “You should really be more worried about yourself. You’re going to be stuck here in the tower with Tony.”

“Oh shit,” Bucky and Steve said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for your comments and kudos! How am I doing so far? Is there anything I can improve? ALSO: I'm considering changing the story summary to the first paragraph of chapter 1. Thoughts?


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 5 should post this coming weekend. HOORAY! 
> 
> Thank you again to [silentwalrus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus), [quietnight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight), and [thigmotaxis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thigmotaxis). I generally just fling anxiety and obsession at them and they are so perfect at what they do.

“Hey. Hey Killbot,” Tony said, and Bucky had no idea how all these people were always getting into Steve’s apartments. It seemed like with all the weapons Bucky had found squirrelled around (how had he even known he would ever end up in the guest apartments?) he might have invested in a lock for the door that worked. “Hey. I want to run some tests on your brainpan. That cool? Of course it is. Come on.”

“ _I am naked in here_ ,” Bucky complained, and his voice was definitely in the ‘shrill’ category. He leaned half around the bathroom door, dripping on the thick carpet in the hallway. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you people always wandering around my kitchen?”

Tony looked mildly insulted. “I would like to point out once again that this is _my_ kitchen. It’s my _guest_ kitchen. Which you’ve, Christ, to which you’ve apparently duct-taped an executioner's dozen of knives under every flat surface, what’s wrong with _you_?” He jiggled a stiletto out of its duct tape prison and held it at arm’s length. “Also, FYI, you’re hiding your junk behind the door," here Tony waved the knife in the general direction of said junk, “but I can see your ass just fine in the mirror behind you.”

“This ain’t a free show, pal,” Bucky sniffed, and slammed the bathroom door shut.

“That means you’re getting dressed, right?” Tony called from the kitchen, obviously going through their cupboards from the noises he was making. “Because my time is important. Hurry up.”

“If your time is so important, go do something else, then!” Bucky scrubbed the towel through his hair, rummaging for the hair products he’d brought over from the other apartment. “You have a building that talks to you, you couldn’t have called ahead and made an appointment?”

“Friday is a very busy woman,” Tony told him starchily. “She doesn’t have time to keep up with your bustling social calendar of mayhem and dismemberment. What are you doing in there? Are you setting up a rocket launcher in my bathroom?”

Bucky ignored him and turned on the hair dryer.

“Are you—are you _fixing your hair_?” Tony shouted over the din, incredulous. Bucky cursed the superhearing and wished he could block Tony out somehow. “You’re fixing your hair. The Winter Soldier is in my bathroom working on his blowout. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Do you hear spooky music?”

“My hair does not have this much bounce and body without serious maintenance,” Bucky shouted back, tipping his head sideways over the flat brush so he could get the right angle. “Do you think this shit happens by accident?”

“How would you know? You have amnesia,” Tony pointed out. “It could. It could happen by accident. You could be putting in all this work for nothing.”

Bucky decided to just ignore him. He was smoothing the flyaways with Buttercup Moisture Leave-In Conditioner when Tony’s phone rang.

“Your bankroller,” Tony answered.

“Change of plans,” Bucky heard Natasha say. “We need you out here to look at some things. Bring James—I don’t trust anyone you’ve left in the tower since Steve got here.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, sharp. “I wonder why I might have moved everyone else I care about the hell out of dodge at the same time the Winter Soldier moved in. What a crazy coincidence.”

“Don’t take the jet.” Natasha ignored him, sounding calm and cool. It was a jarring contrast to the screams Bucky could hear in the distance. “Too noticeable; you should just drive. We’re in the middle of cornfields out here, so don’t bring a sportscar.”

“First you tell me to drive,” Tony grumbled, “then you tell me not to bring the sportscar. Am I going to Flintstone it to invade Hydra? Is that the plan?”

If Natasha was annoyed, it didn’t show in her voice. She was probably taking it out on whoever was whimpering nearby. “Yet another Chevy tooling around is going to concern exactly no one. A jet? Your lipstick red Tesla? Not quite as inconspicuous.”

“This is a terrible idea,” Bucky could hear Steve protesting in the background. There was a grunt, and something crashed. “Who pictures Bucky and Tony on a five hour road trip and thinks it’s a good idea? That is going to be _much_ worse than leaving them in the tower together.”

***

“I spy… with my little eye… something starting with M.” 

“Gee, is it murderer, Tony?” Bucky frowned at the yutz driving next to him, signaled, and swept into the other lane. Tony looked at the blinker, then looked at Bucky, raising his eyebrows over a pair of sunglasses that probably cost more than Bucky’s arm. 

Tony had insisted that _there is no way I am driving a chevy pickup, Barnes, you take the wheel and I will try to pretend I don’t exist_ , which had honestly sounded pretty good to Bucky, but it had turned out to mean _you drive while I complain about you incessantly and silently question all your driving choices_. 

“What else am I?” Bucky asked, distracted. Everyone driving out of New York that day was ferrying around their sainted grandmothers, apparently. “Am I your stepmom? Your ex’s new girl? The slut who’s taking up all your big brother’s time? Because this is a lot of hats to wear. I need to make sure I have them all straight so I can do them justice.”

“You’re the psychotic killer who beat my parents to death while they begged for their lives.” Tony leaned the seat back and tucked his chin into his collar. “Steve probably begged, too. You shattered his cheekbone, shot him three times, then dropped him out of a helicarrier into the Potomac. Tossed his jogging buddy off the same set of helicarriers, come to think of it. Make sure you keep track of ‘traitor’ and ‘turncoat’ when you’re taking your next hat inventory.”

Bucky didn’t have anything to say to that. He focused on passing the jerk in the oversized truck ahead of them instead. Tony made a weird face at him when he put on the turn signal again.

“Steve doesn’t seem like the type to beg. At least, not for himself,” Bucky said after a moment, and ignored the whisper in the back of his head that said _everyone is the type to beg, given enough incentive_. 

Tony must have had mind reading powers, though, because he turned away with a smirk. “We’re all full of surprises. You, especially.”

“Look.” Bucky revved the engine and sped up; the moron in the truck matched him. “You’ve been dropping sly little cracks this whole trip, but I have amnesia. Whatever it is you’re referring to, I don’t remember it. That’s what ‘amnesia’ means.”

Tony sneered, kicking his feet up on the dash and tilting back further. It was driving Bucky crazy. He didn’t like having to turn to pay attention to where Tony was while he was trying to concentrate on something else. It made the back of his neck itch. “You think you’re cute,” Tony drawled, getting comfortable. “You believe Steve when he says it wasn’t you.”

“Not that it helps,” Bucky admitted, slowing down to pull behind. The dumbass slowed down too, and he couldn’t get over. “But seeing as Hydra has the technology to literally download my head like a midi file—”

“Midi file,” Tony repeated, aghast. “The weird crap that got left behind on your hamster wheel. _Midi file_.”

“—I figure it’s pretty reasonable that they can wipe and rewrite, too. From everything you keep bitching about, it doesn’t sound like I have a lot in common with myself when I have a half-functional long term memory.”

Tony sat beside him quietly for a moment, and Bucky slammed on the gas and pulled around in front of the truck. Then he hit the brakes, flipped the fucker off when she laid on the horn, and sped back up.

“Whatever monster Hydra saw in you,” Tony said, after they had driven for a while longer, “you had before they got there. People don’t change, Caligula. Steve doesn’t, which is why everything is complete shit right now, and yet he _still_ manages to take the high ground. Natasha doesn’t, which is probably why Bruce hasn’t come back yet. The world doesn’t. I sure as hell don’t.”

Bucky side-eyed him. “I’m pretty sure imprisonment, torture, and involuntary body modifications might cause a few personality changes over time.”

“You’d think so,” Tony agreed, and something in his voice made Bucky look over again. Tony was sprawled across his seat, lazing to the side, but his hands were tight on the armrests. “But I’m still the same.” 

***

Tony spent the next hour in his seat staring at him, the stupid turn signal, and the speedometer. Eventually it got to be too much and Bucky pulled off the expressway to refuel, take a piss and obtain a much-needed blood sugar boost. He filled the tank and headed inside to load up.

The gas station was old and empty aside from the bored teenager manning the till, but it was stocked with a beautiful array of tooth-rotting, absolutely nutritionless convenience food. Bucky only just barely held back from sweeping entire shelves into the basket. He settled for picking about 56 of what he immediately decided with no evidence whatsoever were his favorites and waddled to the counter, the load precariously balanced under his chin.

The teenager’s eyes widened. “Holy shit,” she said, guileless, and Bucky liked that. He felt a smile rising up. “Did you completely wipe us out?”

“I can’t help it, everything looks amazing when you’re this hungry.” Bucky apologized, a Babe Ruth in his mouth already as he passed over the wrapper for her to scan. She hid a smile, poorly, and Bucky grinned around the chocolate. “This is heaven. This is sugar-coma, plasticized caramel heaven.”

The girl laughed a little at that, and Bucky winked at her, picking up his bags and starting up a whistle as he strolled out.

Tony had obviously been watching him from the front seat, and if Bucky hadn’t been in the station the whole time, he would swear Tony had just watched a tap dancing moose clatter its way through. Bucky paused, considered the past 36 hours, and looked back inside just in case. No moose.

“Okay, shit,” Tony said, climbing out and slamming the door shut behind him. “I’m goddamn driving, I can’t take this anymore. You win. I can’t deal with it.”

Bucky watched him, confused and with his face full of s’mores-themed candy bites. He made an inquiring sound, but Tony was already hopping in the driver’s seat, so Bucky shrugged and worked on chewing. He wasn’t sure how he would have managed without the super-serum or whatever, but the enhanced jaw strength was definitely worth it. 

Tony waited about ten seconds for Bucky to strap himself in, then violently reversed and pulled a tight u-turn before rocketing out of the parking lot like he was late for a board meeting, or whatever people as rich as Tony rushed for. Bucky nearly choked and grabbed onto the door, sputtering graham cracker crumbs and processed chocolate all over his lap, and Tony floored it, zipping around the cars in his way like they were standing still. Bucky crossed himself and tested his seatbelt with as much subtlety as he could.

It was not a lot of subtlety, as it turned out. Tony gave him another of his inexplicable looks. “Much as I’m glad that kid at the register wasn’t watching you wander around with her hand on the panic button the entire time like they usually do,” Tony said, “this is fucking weird. Stop it.”

“Sorry,” Bucky said, unclenching his hand from the door. The handle was warped and he cringed inwardly. “Shit, sorry,” he repeated, trying to force his heart rate to slow. They weren’t going _that_ fast, and even though he clearly hated it, the Chevy _was_ Tony’s. Bucky clutched the packet of the s’mores bites and tried very hard to remember his manners. He had just crunched up the dude’s car. “Uh. You want some?” he asked, even though it was probably clear on his face that he really wanted to eat them all without any help.

“No! Seriously. Fucking stop it,” Tony exploded, all sudden, tight movement and stiff disdain. “Cut the little act. I’m not going to kick you out in the middle of nowhere, as much as I’d love to, because I do that and Steve runs back to Wakanda so fast my entire tower spins. You don’t need to keep playing it up.”

Bucky chewed. Fine, be like that. Dickbag. “Tony, I would love to be an asshole and come back with whatever you want me to say least, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He swallowed the chocolate and marshmallow perfection and couldn’t help stuffing the rest of the bag right in after it. “If we’re both going to be our best, most sarcastic selves, you need to give me a _little_ to work with. Is this the sister-in-law thing again? No, wait, am I your new stepmom? Am I trying to bond too much?”

“I think if I wanted to adopt a new father figure,” Tony said, scandalized, “I wouldn’t choose Steve, who unironically tucks his shirts into his jeans. I own half of New York. I think I could afford a better dad than _that_.”

“I’m not going to make Steve choose between us, sweetie,” Bucky said amiably, opening up the next marshmallow bar. “Let’s you and me be good friends instead. Friends where your daddy is balls deep in my ass as soon as you go to bed. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the door locked.”

Tony gave him the most revolted, nauseated look Bucky thought a human face could make. “I don’t even have anything to say to that,” Tony said. “I don’t even have a response. That was so—I think I’m never going to be able to touch my dick again, and if you didn’t have amnesia, you’d know how extreme that is.”

“I hope it haunts your dreams,” Bucky said around his Charleston Chew, and went back to work testing his super jaw muscles.

The snacks did not last the remaining two hours, and Bucky headed straight to the vending machine when they got to the motel. The damn thing only dispensed one item at a time. 

This was going to take a while.

“Oh my god,” Tony said, too distracted by the 1970s brown shag carpeting to keep up the constant bewildered face he’d been pulling at every little move Bucky made _for the entire drive_. “Where are we? Is this building even legal?”

“I’m guessing Natasha chose this one because they’re happy to leave a key for us on the counter and don’t have any security cameras,” Bucky offered, nodding at the envelope on the otherwise empty front desk, and continued jabbing at the keypad. The machine booped and whined and dropped another candy bar and his change.

“Stop giving the vending machine indigestion and get the luggage,” Tony ordered, and Bucky gave him a _make me_ look in response. “No really,” Tony said. “Eat later. I put your superhero getup in the back.”

***

Bucky twisted to the right, then the left, then gave up. “How the hell does this even go on?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Tony said, squinting. He’d pressed a button and suddenly he was fully suited up to the neck in complicated, interlocking red and gold armored plates. Bucky was taking considerably longer. “Maybe that piece goes—nope. Nevermind. I have no idea.”

“Why do I have all these straps and buckles?” Bucky complained, snapping something in place on his hip and hoping it was supposed to do that. “What do they even do? And where do I put all these knives?”

“Don’t ask me.” Tony frowned at him. “I have personally witnessed you going from stark naked to armed in the time it took to blink, and I have no idea where the knife came from. I’m assuming lube was involved.”

Bucky stopped and stared at him. “Are you saying I have an ass knife? Are you telling me I keep a knife stuffed up my actual rectum?”

“I don’t know! Probably!” Tony waved a gauntlet, whirring quietly. “Just hurry up, stick the knives in wherever.”

“I haven’t had a lot of time to do a full self-exploration since I woke up,” Bucky argued, sticking the knives in wherever. “But I feel like maybe I would have noticed, you know, a _weaponized butt plug_.” About half the stuck on wherever knives fell off; Bucky figured if they weren’t going to stay, he didn’t need them. He wasn’t completely sure he would know what to do with them, anyway. He dug through the pile of weapons and unearthed a piece of vaguely curved plastic with yet another set of straps attached and stared at it. “What’s this?”

Tony peered at it. “Your cup? I dunno, do cyborg assassins even feel it when you get kicked in the balls?”

“I’m going to look like a moron,” Bucky groused, and stuffed it down his pants.

***

The Hydra base was not what Bucky had expected.

Not that anything since he’d woken up had been, so he should have been ready for it, but he had been basically picturing long, ominous metal hallways patrolled by black-garbed, dead-eyed drones. He hadn’t imagined the break room, or the cubicles, or the dormitory. 

What he had pictured, knowing Steve and Natasha had already torn through the place, were the scores of bodies littering every room. He wondered what it meant that he wasn’t freaking out anymore. Was he in shock? Was he getting used to it? Or was his good old murdering self coming back? He’d been eating enough, _some_ neural pathways had to be connecting.

And on the tail of that thought, he noticed the snacks. He hadn’t eaten in at least an hour or two.

“What are you doing?” Tony asked. “Are you _feeding coins into that vending machine_? This is a _Nazi stronghold_. Just break the damn machine.”

Bucky contemplated that, and didn’t really have an argument, so he tore the plastic cover off with his super convenient metal arm and went to town.

“Are we done?” Tony asked, watching Bucky cram the pouches that weren’t filled with ammo full of chocolate coated nougat. “Or are you still busy? By all means, take your time, just let me know when we're done looting the Cheeze Bombs and can start looting the sensitive technology. No rush.”

“Ready now,” Bucky said, mouth and pockets filled, and followed Tony down another body-strewn corridor for maybe six steps before he stopped again.

“Oh for the love of—I will buy you a candy store when we get back!” Tony yelled.

“This one’s alive!” Bucky said, dropping to the ground. He’d almost passed over the black-clad agent as just another body, but the guy had been dropped right up against a kickplate attached to the double doors. There had been a tiny bloom of moisture on the polished metal from his breath. 

“Not for long,” Tony said skeptically, looking down, and he was likely right—the black uniform was soaked through with blood. Bucky started ripping it off, trying to find the wound. “What—Now what are you doing? I know I told you to just deface their vending machine, but stripping them naked postmortem just seems like insult on top of…” Tony stopped mid sentence. Even though his face was entirely covered by his helmet, Bucky knew he was making that same damn weird face he’d been making on the drive over. “Oh. You’re. Are you trying to…Barnes, you still don’t get it. These are _Hydra_. Hydra are the ones who tortured you, then pulled your brain out through your nose like taffy before stuffing it back in full of kill orders on all your buddies.” He waited for Bucky to stop, and when Bucky kept right on saving a teenager’s life, he added, “ _For seven decades_.”

Bucky frowned and gave Tony a look of his own before going right back to triage. “This kid is maybe sixteen, tops,” he said, and finally found a deep slice in the agent’s leg under all the blood. “I doubt he had anything to do with me.”

“Noooo?” Tony managed. “No, he probably had a lot to do with killing or torturing someone _else_ , though.”

“I’m not saying I’m gonna bake him a cake and give him a blowjob, Tony,” Bucky countered, putting pressure on the wound. “I’m not even saying don’t stab him in the first place. I’m just saying stab him, but then follow the Geneva Conventions.”

“How are the Geneva Conventions still in your brainpan? And the Geneva conventions are for nations at war, not for extralegal vigilante squads funded by private business in—oh for Christ’s sake, here, at least use a bandage.” A section of Tony’s suit opened up and he tossed what turned out to be a mini first aid kit Bucky’s way. “Fine, you’re right, I know you’re right, just do it fast and don’t let him pull a gun on you if he wakes up. I guarantee you that this is Natasha’s work, and if she stuck him full of knives it wasn’t because he was knitting socks for orphans.”

Bucky gave him a grateful smile and got to work. As long as he didn’t think too hard about it, his hands seemed to know what to do, so he tried not to focus. Tony was anxious, and his nervous shifting back and forth was making an irritating mechanical noise as his armor shifted with him. He didn’t seem very alert for an attack, though, which meant he was probably antsy about Steve.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Bucky suddenly realized. “Am I?”

“Technically,” Tony said, “international law says I’m not supposed to be here either. We’re both supposed to be in that crummy motel back in town waiting for Steve to get his thumb out of his ass. Honestly, though, when you involve Nazis everyone is pretty lenient on the particulars.” 

Bucky frowned, unwinding a bandage with his right hand while he kept up pressure with his left. “Isn’t that… dangerous? If Steve and Natasha are assuming everyone here is the enemy?”

“Not really for me,” Tony admitted, gesturing. “Impervious metal suit and all.”

Bucky paused, then turned half around to face him. Tony didn’t say anything. Bucky looked down at himself, clothes askew, with straps stretched haphazardly across his uniform and what knives and guns he’d actually clipped on staying in place more from luck than skill.

Tony very clearly conveyed ‘Oh well, what can you do’ in robot-suited body language.

“You are going to get me killed.” Bucky wiped his hands off with an alcohol pad and tossed it in a corner. “I’m going to die, and I’m going to do it looking like some asshole half done up in his little sister’s bondage gear.”

“I mean,” Tony said, tilting his head. “I guess you’re not wrong—”

“ _Bucky_?” Steve said, horrified and outraged, and Bucky and Tony both whipped around to stare at him. Steve was lowering his shield, and Natasha was putting several lethal looking objects back into sheaths that were very clearly strapped on with practiced skill. Bucky tamped down the flare of jealousy and tried to pretend he was a competent super-assassin, too.

It didn’t help that Steve was sweaty, dirty, and despite having been spattered with _several_ pints of someone else’s insides, the mussed hair and fierce competence was a _very_ good look on him. And shit, whatever star-studded flag cosplay he had on made his shoulder-to-waist ratio even _more_ ridiculous. If Bucky’s dick hadn’t been strangled with a minimum of six unnecessary buckles and an athletic cup, he definitely would have popped a boner right there despite the thirty dead bodies.

“Uh,” Bucky managed. “Surprise?”

Steve looked like he wanted to bury a chair in the wall.

“In my defense,” Tony said, putting his hands up in surrender, “he took out half a team in his pajamas with a piece of glass last night. I didn’t realize until like ten minutes ago that he wasn’t just fucking with me.” 

“Tony,” Steve grated out, “Can I talk to you for a moment? Over here.”

“Sure, Dad—” Tony started, but then Bucky caught his eye with a smug grin and Tony looked like he wanted to swallow his tongue. It didn’t stop Steve, though, and he lit into Tony with the best Dad Voice Bucky had ever heard. Somehow Steve managed to pitch the argument so that Tony’s suit could pick it up, but Bucky had a hard time listening in, which was fine, really. Bucky and Natasha didn’t even pretend they weren’t doing their best to eavesdrop.

“Hydra invested half of their east coast operations into the last raid _just for him_ ,” Steve hissed, looking like he was about to bite through his shield. “And after that huge sacrifice of resources and personnel, _we_ ended up with the brain chip. You don't think bringing him along, when he’s like this, _and not even telling me_ \--”

“Okay, yes, totally with you on this,” Tony interrupted. “In retrospect, it was a terrible idea.”

“How did this not occur to you _before you got here?_ ”

“What,” Natasha asked after a minute of watching Tony and Steve whisper furiously at each other, “are you wearing?”

“Uh.” Bucky looked down at himself. “My super suit?”

“Your ‘super suit’,” Natasha said after a moment. “Okay. Why do you have your mask down your pants?”

“Uh,” Bucky said again, squirming. That explained a lot, really. “I thought it was a cup?”

Natasha looked him over very carefully. “It is not a cup.”

Bucky’s mouth flattened into a thin line. “I’m getting that.”

Natasha nodded, obviously judging him, and said, “Don’t drop your pants right now though. We already know how Steve reacts when that happens.”

“Come on,” Steve interrupted them. “This was a mess already, but now it’s definitely worse. Natasha, you go with Tony, show him what we’re looking at. Find out what he needs to transport out of here and what he can just copy the plans for before we blow it up. I’m getting Bucky somewhere _far away_ from the people who want to _make robotic copies of him by ripping his memories out with alien electronics, Jesus Christ_.”

“Lord’s name,” Tony pointed out, but Steve only had the time to take a deep breath in response before Natasha and Bucky grabbed them both and steered them in opposite directions.

“Don't forget the kid,” Bucky said. Tony’s weird look was turning into yet another, entirely different, weird look, but Steve and Natasha just looked confused. “The kid. The kid on the floor, who’s still alive.”

Steve gave the kid on the floor who was still alive a hard stare that said he’d rather dive headfirst into a pile of dog shit than touch a baby Nazi, but his mouth twisted and he tossed the unconscious body over his shoulder. Bucky felt it again, the warm bloom in his chest, when Steve made sure to be careful of the wound even when he clearly hated who it was attached to.

“Again,” Tony said as Natasha dragged him off, “I just want to point out. Seven decades of torture.”

“Thanks for taking me to see where you work, Tony!” Bucky returned brightly. “I couldn't have enjoyed it more even if I’d been your real mom.”

“You’re disgusting, Barnes,” Tony shot back, but Natasha had put on serious speed and he didn’t have a lot of time to get anything good out. “Can I disown you if you’re not even married? Is that a thing I can do?”

“You’re stuck with me, Honey Bunny!” Bucky hollered across the distance before Natasha took Tony around a sharp bend in the hallway. “I’ve seen my ass, there is no way Steve is ditching this!”

“I have no idea what you two are talking about,” Steve said, “but I want no part of it.”

Bucky made kissy faces at him until Steve looked around furtively, smacked said ass, _hard_ , then took off down the hallway like his sinful thoughts were about to catch up with him all at once.

All things considered, really, Bucky was _very_ thankful for the mask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel silly saying this, because _obviously_ , but just in case I would like to let everyone know that Bucky following the Geneva Conventions in this chapter is in no way meant to humanize and condone _actual Nazis_. Demonize away. Nazis are the literal fucking worst.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I loved this chapter and I hated this chapter and then I loved this chapter. I am flip flopping all over the place, so be sure to let me know what side you fall on. 
> 
> ALSO: if you have been waiting for a sex scene, THIS CHAPTER IS NOT IT. On the upside, chapter 6 is mostly finished, and will post this weekend, and that one DOES have a sex scene. Steve wrecks a table. So yay!

The problem with eating enough to fix your wrecked synapses, Bucky was finding, was you fixed the wrecked synapses. When he was awake, it wasn’t so bad; it was uncomfortable when he stumbled over new and distressing abilities his body knew that he didn’t, but he could handle that. It was freaky and disturbing, but recovering while awake was okay.

It was the dreams that really _sucked ass_ , and he woke up screaming _every damn time_ , which was goddamn ridiculous. It wasn’t like it was _news_ anymore that he’d been a bugnuts crazy mass assassination machine for seventy years. The dreams, though, spewed up buckets of really fresh, first-hand information. With details. And specifics. And the _very best part_ was that he got to relive the whole horror show with emotions and sense memories attached. 

Bucky was getting really familiar with the fucking toilet seat.

Bucky lurched out of bed, _again_ , throat raw and stomach roiling, _again_ , and blundered into the bathroom. Steve was close behind, and he had the seat up and Bucky’s hair back before the puking started, with a warm cloth to clean Bucky’s face and a cool glass of water ready when it all ended. Bucky dropped back against him, shivering and curled up into himself, and Steve just held on.

Bucky took a deep breath, then another. “I know what it feels like to break a man’s neck while he sleeps next to his kid,” he whispered, and Steve couldn’t do anything to help that. He stroked his hand down Bucky’s arm, and Bucky flinched away. “I don’t want this anymore,” he choked out, clawing at where the metal dug into flesh. “I don't want it.”

“I’ll show you how to take it off,” Steve told him, and if Steve minded any bit of this whole mess beyond the anguish it was causing Bucky, he never showed it.

It wasn’t fair, but Steve’s patience was starting to wear on Bucky, too. He told himself, very firmly, to get over it. He took another deep breath, held it, let it out. Forced himself to stop touching the arm. 

Steve kissed Bucky’s brow, slowly, letting Bucky decide if he wanted to pull away or not. Then he unbent and headed into the kitchen. “This is the shit Tony was talking about, isn’t it?” Bucky rasped, but Steve had super hearing. He would catch it. Bucky tapped his fingers on the cabinet behind him restlessly and watched Steve go digging through a drawer to unearth a packet of what looked like lock picks. “This is why he was talking about babyproofing. This is your second time around on the shittiest roller coaster at the park.” 

“I haven’t thrown up on it as much as you have, so I’d say I’m having a pretty easy time,” Steve said, kneeling next to Bucky and using one of the picks to gently pry at a plate on the arm. Bucky gritted his teeth. “Not that Tony was making a whole lot of sense with the baby-proofing. I mean, you found about fifteen handguns in the cupboards and a bayonet stuffed down the back of the couch your first day back.” 

Bucky watched his arm open up like an insect. It made him want to cry, or scream, but he just sat there.

“But no. This isn’t…new,” Steve admitted, looking up from his work, “but it’s not, you know. As bad.” Steve’s mouth went flat as he obviously tried to decide how much to say, then he sighed. “You were a lot more scared, on top of dealing with the memories. And it was harder for you to calm down when you got upset.” He looked down again and pressed two of the longer picks into Bucky’s arm; there was a sharp _click_ Bucky felt in his bones. 

Bucky didn’t respond, and Steve looked up again. “You were doing pretty good by the end of it, though,” he offered. “We were taking those stupid missions from Tony because it helped, using what Hydra taught you, but for good reasons. You were feeling really good about it.”

Bucky nodded, watching Steve’s hands, and didn’t reply. Steve pulled up some sort of latch, then twisted it and pressed it back in again. Bucky felt the weight drop from his shoulder as the arm sagged against his side. He still had a metal cap around the edges of his shoulder, but the arm was completely loose in its socket. He shrugged it off, letting it hit the floor with a loud _clunk_. “I’m going to put this away,” Steve told him, standing and picking it up with both hands. “But it’s just in the case in the hall closet.”

“Yeah,” Bucky acknowledged, distracted, brushing the rim of the cap with his fingertips. It set his teeth on edge, so he stopped. “Hey,” he asked after Steve padded back, curling his big, warm body around Bucky and holding him close. The nightmares all seemed just a little more distant. “How did you fall in love with me?” 

It was a tight squeeze, two very large men sitting side by side on a fluffy pink bathmat, but Steve fit in with the ease of long practice, and Bucky’s body knew how to make the space. 

“Geez, Bucky,” Steve huffed. His smile was genuine, and he clearly meant it when he said, simply, “How could I not?” 

Bucky took a moment to let the sheer absurdity of that sink in. “But I’m fighting with you,” he argued. “On top of everything. Bad enough…” Bucky swallowed back the _bad enough you still won’t let me touch you_ , because he _was_ touching him. Steve touched him all the time. He was touching him right now.

“That’s,” Steve started, “well. That’s complicated.” He shrugged. “I’m not as good about the stuff that’s about me. You were getting better enough to start wanting me to deal with my own shit, too.”

Bucky smiled a little at that. 

“I’m not actually very good at this, Buck.” Steve waved a hand vaguely. “You’re not letting me get away with setting my jaw and deciding to just _do better_ , anymore, and you’re right. I need to get my act together.”

Bucky shrugged and rested his brow on Steve’s shoulder. “I still think you’re doing pretty well,” he offered.

Steve leaned into him. “Thanks, pal,” he said. “I think you’re doing pretty okay, too.”

“Hey,” Bucky pressed his mouth to Steve’s neck, and Steve pulled him in tight. Bucky turned his head. “It’s been bothering me. This happens to me all the time, yeah? So which version of me did you like best?”

Steve laughed. “Bucky,” he said, like it was the dumbest question in the world. “I love every version of you.”

***

“I’m having dreams,” Bucky told Natasha, when he found her in what were apparently the abandoned Avenger common rooms. Not a lot of Avengers around to use them, anymore. He thought it said something about Tony’s feelings on the matter that the rooms were all still here.

“I don’t want to hear about your Captain America sex dreams,” Natasha told him, intent on sharpening one of her many knives. She stopped briefly and thought about it. “Nevermind. Yes I do. Go on.”

“Shut up.” His mouth was dry, remaining arm tight around himself. Talking about this kind of thing with anyone but Steve made him want to pitch himself in a well and spend the rest of his life interacting with nothing but slime mold… but he was working on getting better, Steve said. And everybody was always fucking saying talking helps. “I’m having…really awful dreams.” He rubbed his shoulder again. “Are they real?”

“Yes,” Natasha said.

Bucky blinked. “I haven’t told you what they were, yet,” he said, nonplussed.

She shrugged. “You took off your arm, and you did a lot of awful things with it, so yeah. I doubt your dreams can come up with anything worse than some of the missions our handlers sent you on, so it’s a good guess.” 

Bucky felt sick. Sicker. 

Natasha met his eyes steadily. “You want a hug, get Steve. Steve will hug you.”

“I don’t want a hug from Steve.” Bucky wanted to hide in a dark hole for a while. 

“Don’t lie. It’s not a good look on you. You always want a hug from Steve.” Natasha pursed her lips. “You thinking of leaving?”

Bucky looked away. “He deserves better than me.”

Natasha nodded, considering. “You’re right. Steve deserves better than you. Than all of us. Hell, he almost deserves better than Sam, and once you meet _Sam_ , well. Let’s just say there are perfect people in the world and we are not them.” Bucky hissed out a breath like he’d been punched. Natasha’s mouth twisted up, a smile without humor. “We should probably all leave. Steve definitely deserves to have everyone he loves abandon him.”

“You’re such an _asshole_ ,” Bucky told her, “ _Fine_. I’m not leaving.”

Natasha grinned and punched him in his partial shoulder. It kind of hurt.

***

“Okay,” Tony said. He stood at a wide conference table that could have seated an entire football team. There were four of them. Bucky had to work to keep from rolling his eyes. “So you remember when I had the scepter overnight and almost ended the world by accident?”

“Yes,” said Steve.

“No,” said Bucky.

“Great, thanks for that,” Tony said, rolling his eyes. “We all know what amnesia means, you don’t need to help out anymore.”

“Really?” Bucky stretched and leaned back in his fancy padded office chair. “Because it seems like you keep needing reminders.”

Steve and Natasha had brought Bucky along into some sort of super secret meeting in a super secret room in the basement of the not-secret-at-all tower that had thousands of people going in and out every day. It was apparently filled with anti-spy tech, and Tony assured them that not only did it cut off all outgoing transmissions, everything in was scanned and processed. It even had facial recognition software that Natasha’s best gadgets couldn’t fool, which meant absolutely nothing to Bucky. She seemed impressed, though. 

“I’m not actually sure why I’m in this meeting,” Bucky admitted, rolling his chair back and forth. “I got fuck all to add, here.”

“You’re here because you deserve to understand what is happening to you,” Steve told him sternly. “And because you deserve to know what everyone is doing about your brain trauma, and how it can be helped.”

“Also in case everyone dies and you have to go on the run alone without your memories,” Natasha added. “It’s just good to cover all your bases.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Tony interrupted, dragging everyone’s attention back to the portable hologram he had set up. “Hydra is nowhere near as smart as I am, but they had the scepter for a very long time. Where I was trying to create the ultimate AI, they focused on the human brain and computerizing everything in it.”

“Big surprise there,” Steve muttered.

“According to the intel Natasha gathered and the files we all looted, they got pretty far with it. Way further than I’d like,” Tony admitted. “They can hook up a brain, go in and fool around with the original software, and pop back out again without ever needing a rewrite, easy peasy.”

Everyone in the room stared, eyes going wide. 

“The GOOD news,” Tony continued, ignoring them, “is that only super-soldiers are going to survive it. The reality of sifting through someone’s brain like this is that it’s only going to work on someone with a healing factor, because the voltage required will literally cook anyone who isn’t constantly repairing the damage.”

“Oh, well,” Bucky managed. “I’m not worried at all anymore.”

“So they want Bucky back,” Steve guessed, getting the look on his face that said he was feeling a lot of feelings and was planning to punch someone in a very meaningful and final way.

“Nope,” Tony said, and when Steve looked confused, “I mean, yes, but according to this, he’s as impossible to manage as I am. Nice job there, Red Scare.” Bucky put out his arm for a fist bump, and Tony obliged.

Steve looked like he was afraid they’d been replaced by robots, but was holding out hope for secret miracles. Natasha just looked thoughtful. “Explain,” she demanded.

Tony waved at the projector and brought up a virtual dreamboard filled with clandestine Nazi death warrants. “Bucko here was a fucking time bomb without a countdown display. He killed Hydra staff all over the place whether they followed protocol or not. He refused random parts of assignments, like killing the dog outside of a target’s home. He went AWOL for no apparent reason in the eighties and just took the train to New York for a ballgame.” He strolled past Bucky and patted him on the head. Bucky gave him the finger back. “And, of course, he flips sides entirely the second Captain America bats his pretty blue eyes and shakes his ass at him.”

“Okay,” Bucky said. “Then why the hell do they want me?”

Natasha quirked her lips up. It wasn’t a smile. “You’re arguably the most dangerous thing that breathes on this continent,” she said reasonably. “Of course Hydra wants you; _everyone_ wants you. Every agency and government in the world but Wakanda and maybe the city council in Woolaroo, South Australia wish you were either dead or theirs.”

Tony spread his arms. “And here you are, conveniently close in New York, undergoing some sort of medical procedure that I’ve assured the government leaves you completely unable to mount any sort of attack on American lives. In retrospect, I’m surprised Hydra is the first problem we’ve had, there.”

“Well,” Natasha allowed, “I did say ‘arguably,’ and the other two in the running are kind of attached to him.” She smiled sweetly at Steve, who nodded acknowledgement.

“I’m, you know, a _little_ dangerous too,” Tony pointed out, annoyed. “In any case, they don’t really want our favorite little mind-wiped assassin. They want his brain.” He flicked his fingers at the hologram and it expanded, showing more data files. Why he couldn’t have just printed them out and passed them around, Bucky had no idea. “They want every skill he’s gotten from them, plus every skill he’s learned working with us, and they want to copy it into what are basically off-brand Hydra Ultrons.”

“That is,” Steve breathed, “an _unbelievably_ bad idea.”

“Wait,” Bucky said. “Ultron?” He glanced at Steve and back to Tony. 

“Tony was ridiculously irresponsible and made an artificial intelligence using an evil alien scepter with the idea it would protect the Earth,” Steve explained. “As it turned out, that’s not exactly how it felt like spending its time.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah, I am completely with you on this. It’s like the scepter had some kind of _mind powers_ that made people entertain _super terrible ideas_ in order to sow discord or something.”

“So we know what Hydra wants,” Natasha cut in. “What do we need to do for James?”

“The good news,” Tony told them, “is that the grey-matter flash drive has a complete copy of Bucky Bear: The Classic Edition. The brain damage came from pulling it out before you’d ejected it properly.”

“Metaphorically,” Bucky said, because he was fairly sure there wasn’t a way to actually drag and drop alien technologies between his ears.

“Metaphorically,” Tony agreed. “So I can just put everything back that got damaged. The _bad_ news is that without the scepter, there isn’t a way to really connect it back in without knowing a lot more than I can get from Hydra’s crappy process files.”

Tony paused, all theatrics, and waited for his cue. “…but?” Natasha prompted, raising an eyebrow.

“ _But_ ,” Tony said triumphantly, “all I need is the metaphorical connector cable, and I can download this sucker no problem.”

There was a tense silence. Bucky shifted uneasily and looked around.

“You need the chair,” Steve said through gritted teeth. He stood up from his seat, but sagged over to lean with both hands on the conference table. “You want to put Bucky in the chair.”

Bucky wasn’t sure what was so bad about chairs, but he was getting a bad feeling from context clues.

“No,” Tony said, waving his hands. “No, no, no. Well, yes. Wait!” he yelped as Steve jerked back upright. “I’m not gonna put him in it! I just need it to make a new, better, _much more humane_ uplink hardware.”

Steve turned to Natasha.

“Oh hell,” Tony said. “Not your weird silent brain language again.”

“I have no idea how they do it,” Bucky agreed. “It’s fucking uncanny.”

Steve looked at them, frowned, and looked at Natasha again. She shrugged.

“I am trusting you, Tony.” Steve didn’t sit back down, but something in him loosened slightly. “I am completely trusting you. Do you swear that this won’t hurt Bucky, won’t brainwash Bucky again, in any way.”

“I completely swear,” Tony declared, hand on his heart.

Steve looked at Bucky.

“We don’t have to use it if it turns out to be a problem,” Bucky pointed out.

“Okay,” Steve said at length. “True.” He turned back to Natasha. “Where does Hydra have a working chair?”

“Oh, oh, I already know that one,” Tony said. “So you know how we keep thinking we’ve finally rooted all the Hydra out of our government? And you know how I had to basically pile up a mountain of favors and blackmail that same government to get you guys off the international wanted lists and into the Tower?”

Steve stared at the ceiling. “Goddamnit,” he said.

***

“I can’t believe you gave the very anti-surveillance tech you use in your own building to a Hydra stronghold disguised as the CIA,” Steve grumbled, pulling the straps tight on his gloves as they stood on the roof and waited for Natasha to bring the jet around. 

“I didn’t,” Tony protested. “I gave the CIA a state of the art research and weapons facility that I’d designed from scratch myself, and _they_ gave it to Hydra.”

Bucky tried to shield his eyes from the wind, but his hair just whipped into his eyes instead, and he was having trouble fending off both with one hand. “Do you think the CIA knows?” he asked, probably looking like a flailing moron. Tony’s face said he did. 

“Jesus,” Steve said, “I hope not.” He turned to Bucky, talking over the sound of Natasha’s jet landing. “This is just reconnaissance, Buck,” Steve assured him, putting his hands on his shoulders and squeezing. “Natasha and I are just going to slip in and out, then head straight back to work out our strategy. I promise.”

“Sure,” Bucky said, chucking Steve in the ribs. “Because everything goes to plan. No,” he added when Steve frowned. “You’re superheroes. It’s just Tuesday. We’re not worried, right?”

Steve kissed him, and Bucky leaned in, closing his eyes. Steve might not be up for makeouts and blowjobs, but Bucky was definitely loving the constant affection that flowed off of him like water. Steve smiled and cupped Bucky’s jaw lightly. 

Then Steve let go and gripped Tony’s arm. “Thank you,” Steve said to Tony, earnest. “It means a lot that I know he’s safe here.”

“Whatever,” Tony said, clearly trying to look unaffected. “Don’t kiss me.”

Steve laughed and headed up the ramp Natasha lowered for him. Tony and Bucky watched it rise into the air, then engage stealth cloaking. It disappeared.

“Awesome,” Tony clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Great. Cool. Come back downstairs. I want to show you something, and Steve is going to kill me if he finds out.”

***

“Okay,” Tony said. They were standing in yet another super-secret room, this one with bonus creepy engineering lab equipment. Tony was in his element, excitement clear on his face. “So! Your life sucks balls.”

Bucky made a face. “You know what, pal—”

“No, seriously, your life is crap.” Tony was waving at his holograms like a magician on cotton candy and a gallon of fruit punch. “Ours is no picnic, don’t get me wrong, but your life is just objectively terrible, and you got this tiny respite and then all the awful started coming back. But here’s the thing,” and here, Tony threw his arms wide, letting two vaguely brain-shaped projections in new-baby pink and blue explode out into the room. “ _It doesn’t have to be_.”

“Yeah, sure,” Bucky agreed. Tony wasn’t exactly putting him at ease. “If only the _seventy years of torture and brainwashing_ hadn’t been a thing.”

“But they don’t have to be! _They don’t have to be_ ,” Tony shouted, gesturing wildly. “Look. This pink one is the model of the data in your brain right after you yanked out the chip. Now, that you is an enormous doofus who used his turn signal like my grandmother, but he sure wasn’t the broody asshole who shot up rooms full of people without so much as blinking, and he’s not the one stuck in the middle puking in my bathroom.”

“Hold on,” Bucky said, “how do you know about—” 

“It was a huge mess, though,” Tony said, poking the a few portions of the pink projection to make it light up magenta. “Your brain, not the bathroom—good job on keeping that legendary aim through all this, Friday says it made cleanup easier—your brain had memories all over, and the connections were jagged and random. Now your body is healing a lot of shitty, shitty stuff back. Probably not all of it, though, I mean I didn’t lie to Steve or anything. There’s a crapton of stuff you aren’t recovering unless we stick it in manually.”

Bucky was starting to see where this was all going. “But the blue one…?” he asked, pointing at the other image.

“ _This one_ ,” Tony said, giddy, “is one where the last seventy years skipped by. I can do it _intentionally_. I can lift the memories out so there’s nothing for the connections to heal _to_.”

Bucky’s mouth went dry, and his hand started to shake. 

“Barnes,” Tony said, “we don’t have to it all back in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO HERE'S A SUMMARY OF THE COMMENTS SO FAR:
> 
> "Tony. No."  
> "GDI TONY. WHY."  
> "ohgodohgodohgod"
> 
> And I just have to say I can't imagine why you all think something like this could possibly go wrong.


	6. Chapter 6

“Did you know,” Steve said, “that pouring sugar in a gas tank doesn’t actually destroy the car? Total myth.”

“Whu—” Bucky asked blearily, still half asleep. He squinted in the dark. “Sugar? What?” 

Steve was leaning over him, damp from the shower. Steve’s super suit was draped over the chair in the corner, and he had on a soft pair of sweatpants Bucky was pretty sure he’d worn himself earlier in the day. He was beautiful.

“Oh my god, Stevie,” Bucky said, muzzy, and shifted to make room. “You’re gonna make me go cross-eyed looking at you, stop it.”

“The sugar doesn’t really get past the filter,” Steve continued, crawling in next to him. “Even if you really just load it in, it’s not even gonna be very noticeable. The worst the owner has to do is get the gas tank removed and dumped out, and maybe go through a few filters.” Steve snuggled in close, knees tucked in behind Bucky’s, face nuzzling the back of Bucky’s neck. Bucky snorted. “At the most you’re looking at a hundred, maybe two hundred bucks of repair, once you even figure out it’s there.”

“You are such a dork,” Bucky said, eyes shut again already. “You were supposed to be investigating a secret Hydra base, not researching failed sabotage from 1996.”

“And on that note,” Steve continued, “guess who caused about four grand in combined damage to the American Nazi Party waiting for Natasha to get back with the hovercraft tonight?”

Bucky rolled over and propped himself up on an elbow to give that the attention it deserved. After a minute, he asked, “Where did you get the sugar?”

“Break room,” Steve said, grinning, and cuddled closer. 

Bucky wrapped his arms around Steve’s shoulders. “You’re in a good mood,” Bucky laughed, dropping a kiss into Steve’s wet hair. It was already soaking into the pillow. “You didn’t come back from your last mission this cheerful.”

“We’re in the home stretch, Buck,” Steve told him, sounding pleased. “We’re gonna get this figured out. We can just waltz in and get everything we need to help you get better.”

Bucky smiled fondly. “You don’t get a lot of magic wands in the superhero business, do you?”

“Not unless they’re the kind that almost destroy small countries, no,” Steve agreed. “It’s really nice to wave my hands, sugar up some cars, and solve all my problems. I could get used to this.” 

“You are _lying_.” Bucky pulled the covers up to their ears. “You _love_ punching your problems.”

Steve laughed again. “It’s nice when punching them makes the problems _go away_ ,” Steve corrected himself.

“Mmm. Okay.” Bucky shuffled further under the blankets. “Fair enough. I’m happy for you, doll. Let’s go back to sleep now,” he mumbled, and passed back out.

***

When Bucky woke up it was morning and the bed was empty again. He could hear the shower running, though, so he wasn’t worried. He yawned, rolled out from under the sheets and into the same sweatpants Steve left on the floor, and almost walked right on top of Natasha.

“What happened to _knocking_ ,” he asked. “Jesus! _Just knock_. I could have had my dick out, for chrissakes.”

“I’ve seen it.” Natasha told him, leaned back against the hallway wall in a sunbeam. “I guess it’s pretty impressive, but I’m good. I promise I’ll knock next time.”

“You _guess_ ,” Bucky repeated, insulted, and stepped over her crossed legs to get to the kitchen and the food it promised. “Do you want something? I don’t know if I used to cook, but I sure as shit don’t anymore. Your options are cereal and cereal.”

“I’ll go with neither, then,” Natasha said, and folded herself gracefully onto the couch.

“I don’t know if I want the cooking back,” Bucky mused, pouring Cheerios into a bowl. “I feel like I’d be on the hook for a lot more work than I am. I like making everyone else do it, and I don’t really mind cereal.”

Natasha laughed out loud at that, and Bucky glanced up, feeling warm. “You may lose your memories a lot, James,” she explained, leaning back and lacing her fingers over her knee, “but the core of you never changes.”

Bucky almost poured the milk all over the counter.

“No?” he asked after a moment, but if Natasha noticed the sudden panic, he couldn’t tell. Bucky was about 64% certain she wasn’t subtly remarking on their secret brain alteration plans. “Tony doesn’t seem to think so,” Bucky offered, hoping to get a better idea.

Natasha rolled her eyes and didn’t comment.

Bucky wasn’t sure he could push it without tipping her off that something was up, so he occupied his mouth with eating. It didn’t take long to scarf everything down, and after rinsing out the bowl in the sink he wandered over and flopped into Natasha’s lap. 

He hadn’t thought about it, and immediately froze in terror until Natasha put her hand on his head like it belonged there. It was nice, and familiar, and he could feel the anxiety that had been building up leach back out of him. 

“We do this,” Bucky said, and Natasha nodded. “We do this…often?”

“You’re very physical,” Natasha said. She patted him on the head, and he made a face. “Don’t worry. You’re not cheating on Steve.”

“I need the two of you so much,” Bucky told her, closing his eyes, and she dragged her fingers through his hair. “You let me need you too much.”

“Steve needs you more than you need him,” she said, and Bucky knew there were hours of unsaid words in that answer, even if he couldn’t pick them out. He let the silence stretch, until she sighed and continued. “I like not being alone,” she admitted. “It's hard to be what we are, but it’s easier with company.”

“You’re like me,” he said, and as soon as it was out of his mouth he realized how ridiculously _stupid_ it was. Of _course_ she was the same. She hadn’t exactly kept it a secret from him, but Steve had never said and he’d been too self-obsessed to think it through.

“Stop it,” she told him, smacking him lightly in the back of the head. “You’re allowed to not notice the person in a life jacket when you’re drowning.”

“I left you here,” Bucky blurted, horrified. “I just forgot you.”

“You’ve forgotten me a lot of times,” Natasha said. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. You’re always a lot happier when you do.”

Bucky frowned, considering that for a moment. Then, “Is… _Steve_ happier now?”

As soon as it was out of his mouth, Bucky knew he shouldn’t have mentioned it. Natasha went blank faced, staring at him, and even as she did Bucky knew it was intentional honesty on her part. He wouldn’t have seen anything if she hadn’t wanted him to.

“Steve’s happy when you’re happy,” she said eventually. “But it matters how you get there.” 

***

“Buckaroonie!” Tony spun around in his stool, hopped off and started tossing things around.

The thing that amused Bucky the most about Tony’s workshop was the combination of painstaking organization and complete disorder. Tony was literally standing in a pile of disassembled electronics trailing wires and losing screws when he said “Behold, your brain!” and gestured to a sleek glass container holding, apparently, the chip Hydra had used to pull out his memories. The wires from _that_ were all carefully bundled and held together with strategic lengths of Velcro, and it looked like the case was custom made and beautifully designed. 

Meanwhile, Tony was about half in and half out of his shirt, and there was engine grease on his teeth. 

“Behold,” Bucky echoed, reaching over to poke at it. It didn’t look big enough, somehow. “You have trouble getting dressed today, Tony?”

“Don’t _touch_ it,” Tony yelped, pulling his arm through the tank top properly and shooing him away. “That’s the only copy. I’ve learned better than to let glowy blue things copy over into my main systems, thanks. Where’s your other, more self-righteous half?”

“He’s getting ready for the retrieval mission with Natasha. What glowy blue things?” Bucky asked, peering at it. “All I see is a floppy disc stuck to a fork and a Lego.”

“That fork was literally stabbed directly into your brain, have some respect for bizarre alien technology, please,” Tony admonished, and got out a laser pointer from somewhere in a neighboring mess. “This ‘Lego’ here is covering it.” Tony wiggled the red dot on the black box situated near the prongs. “It’s made out of some sort of dampening material, and I’m pretty sure it was made to keep the whole blue-light-brain-copy tech low key and unnoticeable. The rest of the electronics are mostly just there for processing the whole thing into information we can use on terrestrial computer systems.”

“You’re not sure about something?” Bucky teased, hopping up onto the stool. It spun a little, under him, and he tried to pretend he didn’t almost immediately fall off. Tony _definitely_ noticed.

“Yeah, well, whoever designed it didn’t make it to be inconspicuous here on earth. This shit gives off…” Tony glanced over at him and Bucky could _see_ Tony translating into moron-speak in his head. “This Lego is basically screaming to most sensors we have here. Just non-stop screaming, so loud it’s hard to pinpoint where the sound is coming from.” Tony tapped the case with the laser pointer. “I think it’s at least partially something Hydra picked up trawling the debris from our little Chitauri incident.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Bucky admitted, staring at the chip, “but please don’t try to explain it to me.”

“Anyway, I’m nearly set to plug in the chair tech and get it all ready to download,” Tony said, typing on a keyboard made of light that he just waved into existence in front of him. It was a pretty neat trick. “Do you want the Russian back? It’s got some disassociated feelings of discomfort attached that are pretty resilient, so it might make you feel weird using it, but hey, language. And what about baking?”

“Not baking,” Bucky said, distracted. He was still staring at the chip. “Fuck that shit. Steve can make me cookies.”

“Steve will make you all the cookies you want, let’s be real,” Tony agreed. “So the Russian? Yes, no? You love sneaking around scaring people, and when it’s not me, I love watching people freak out because of it, so you might leave that in. Obviously we’re gonna cut out all the torture stuff, and the murder parts. You want any piano skills? That was a thing when you were getting fine motor control down on the—”

There was the sudden sound of crushing metal and shattering glass.

Bucky and Tony both turned abruptly to find Steve holding the twisted remains of the door, splintered debris still clinging to its frame. He stood under the broken frame, dressed head to toe in combat gear as if he’d been on his way to check in before he left with Natasha.

“Shit,” Tony said.

Bucky agreed. Vehemently. This was not going to go well.

Steve looked _furious_. Even in Bucky’s worst dreams, Steve was never so livid. Steve’s breathing was shallow and his face was red, and when he flung the twisted metal to the floor it skidded across the entirety of the workshop and knocked over three sets of shelves. 

Bucky swallowed, hard. The majority of his brain was screaming _run_ almost as loudly as his heart was pounding in his ears, and it was only the bone-deep certainty that Steve would never, ever be a danger to him that kept him in place. 

“Which version do I like best,” Steve ground out, realization making his face twist. “You asked me, ‘which version of me do you like best’.”

“You gave the right answer,” Bucky whispered, but it was like he hadn’t spoken. Steve swallowed, vibrating with rage.

“You can’t do this,” Steve rasped, stalking forward, “you can’t keep carving pieces of yourself away for me. I brought you to Tony for medical treatment, not a _redesign_.” 

“It’s not a redesign,” Tony said. “It’s lifting the—your metaphor is ridiculous, Steve. I’m not changing him, I’m just giving him menu options for what I put back in—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Steve barked, whirling to glare at him, and if he’d been angry before, now he was _incandescent_. He took several deep breaths, and Bucky’s heart broke at the mingled rage and betrayal in his face. “I trusted you,” he told Tony, as if the words were being bled from him. “I brought him to you. _I left him with you._ ”

“You brought him to me so I could _fix_ him,” Tony shot back. “This will fix him! With this I can wipe out the words like they were never there, lift out the trauma so it never happened—”

“HE IS NOT BROKEN,” Steve bellowed, and Bucky would have shut the fuck up right there, but Tony seemed physically incapable of it. Bucky wasn’t sure how the man hadn’t gotten himself killed by this point.

“He _is_ broken!” Tony shouted back, and even though Steve looked like he wanted to take everything in the lab apart and destroy it piece by piece, Tony didn’t retreat. “ _We are all broken, Steve!_ You think I wouldn’t leap at this chance if I could? You think I wouldn’t cut out every part of me that I could? I would use this in a second, Steve! _But there is no better me to go back to!_ ”

“ _This is not about you!_ ” Steve roared. 

“You can’t _martyr_ someone on your own behalf!” Tony was furious now, too, his knuckles white on the laserpointer he still held, and Bucky was genuinely worried that it would end up stabbed through someone at any moment. Tony kept jabbing it at Steve’s face as he spoke, and Steve showed more teeth every time he did. “You don’t get to use me, use my brilliance and my money and my tech, and make him into someone who suffers because you feel too guilty to take the easy way out! _Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s wrong!_ ”

“ _If it’s always the right thing to do_ ,” Steve hollered, “ _then why do you keep doing it behind my back?_ ”

And Bucky said, “You’re scaring me, Stevie.”

Steve had just sucked in a breath to shout again. Wrath was in every line of his body—teeth still bared, fists clenched and ready—and when he turned to the sound of Bucky’s voice the fury followed him. Bucky couldn’t help it, and took an unthinking step back.

Just like that, Steve’s eyes changed and he froze. Bucky watched every part of Steve suddenly shutter closed and tighten. Steve took a deep breath, then another, flexing his hands and working his jaw, visibly wrapping everything up and tying it down inside. 

It was worse than the shouting. 

“This is part of the fight we were having, isn’t it?” Bucky asked quietly, when Steve didn’t say anything. “Being here.”

“Yeah,” Steve rasped, dropping his head and closing his eyes. He blew the breath he’d been holding out, then looked up again. “We should have stayed in Wakanda, but it sure didn’t take much to talk me into coming back here instead. You thought I could maybe—even when it is _so clear_ that I was just—” He cut himself off and refocused on Tony for a moment, who looked like someone had cracked him over the head with one of his own metal boots, then back on Bucky. “I let this go on too long. I just kept giving in, and hoping, and letting it cut up the both of you for too long.”

“You sound pretty cut up, too, baby,” Bucky shaking himself free of the paralysis and reaching out to touch Steve’s arm. 

Steve’s breath caught and his hand tightened over Bucky’s. “We’re going back to Wakanda.” 

“Okay, Stevie,” Bucky agreed, stepping further into Steve’s space in the hopes it might unwind the heavy tension. It didn’t, but Steve’s head moved to follow him, and Bucky felt his own breath catch. No matter what Steve was feeling, he was still oriented to Bucky like a magnet. “Whatever you want, sweetheart, sure. We’re going back to Wakanda.”

“You can’t go back to _Wakanda_ ,” Tony scoffed, and everything that had tilted in Steve tensed up again, but he didn’t pull away from Bucky. “You’re not here because you want to work things out. You _need me_ , you’d be long gone if you didn’t.”

Steve didn’t say anything, but he did look at Tony, now. Tony flinched.

“Come on,” Bucky said, tugging at Steve. “Wakanda.” Steve looked back at Bucky and nodded, following as Bucky pulled him to the destroyed doors.

“You didn’t come back here for me!” Tony shouted at them as they left, and Bucky had a horrible double vision of Steve dragging him away from Tony somewhere else. “You came back here for him!”

“Come on,” Bucky repeated, and he held Steve close while they made their way past the broken metal and glass.

***

“So…um, I don’t actually know what Wakanda is,” Bucky admitted to break the silence, kicking off his boots and closing the door behind him. The trip up to the apartment hadn’t eased Steve’s tightened jaw, but he wasn’t standing ramrod straight anymore. Instead, Bucky could see Steve slowly collapsing in on himself, the anger and frustration turning inwards instead. Bucky watched him drop into a chair at the kitchen table, still in his superhero gear. It creaked in the quiet.

“It’s a country,” Steve said, sagging forward. “They gave us asylum while we were fugitives.”

Bucky thought about it, dropping his sweatshirt over a chair and padding closer. “We can’t really just go back tonight, can we?”

“No.” Steve pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, we can’t. We would need to—there’s—I need to contact King T’Challa. But we’re not leaving for another week at least.”

Bucky stroked Steve’s back, and Steve shivered under his palm despite the thick canvas of the suit. “Gonna be one fucking awkward week,” Bucky muttered. He started pulling at Steve’s many tabs and zippers. 

Steve shook himself and stood up, roughly yanking at the heavy outer shell that had covered his shoulders and chest. He dropped it on the floor, stared at it a moment, then sighed and picked it up to hang on the back of another chair. “We can’t just get a hotel somewhere either, it’s in six different damn legal agreements I signed with the President.” Steve hissed in irritation and went back to working on his suit. Bucky pulled at the layers over Steve’s arms, but Steve shrugged him off and stripped out of the rest of it himself. Bucky didn’t try to hide his surprise, and Steve looked immediately remorseful. 

“Sorry, Buck, I…” Steve ran his hands through his hair and clenched his eyes shut. “Everything. I’m sorry. I fucked everything up.”

“Hey, no, it’s okay.” Bucky said, reaching out for him again. This time, Steve let him. Bucky ran his hand along to the back of Steve’s neck and pulled him down to press Steve’s brow to his. “You’re doing okay,” Bucky told him. “I promise. You’re still doing okay.” 

“I never—” Steve started. He pulled back enough to look Bucky in the eyes, face set like he was bracing himself. “Everything I do, I just watch you get ripped apart again.”

“It’s not your fault,” Bucky said. He carded his fingers through Steve’s hair, and Steve caught his wrist. “Baby. It’s not your fault.”

“You don’t know that,” Steve said, and he sounded like he was drowning. He was holding Bucky’s wrist tight enough to hurt. “You don’t remember. You don’t know everything I’ve let happen to you. _No_ ,” Steve insisted when Bucky tried to speak, pulling back further, but keeping the death grip on Bucky. “ _This_ was the big fight. Tony isn’t the problem. _I’m the problem_. You wanted me to fix the mess I’ve made of Tony, of myself, of our lives, _and I can’t_.”

“Stevie,” Bucky said. “You know that’s not what the fight was about.” 

“ _How would you know_?” Steve asked, but it was despairing, not mean. His grip slackened, and Bucky cupped Steve’s cheek in his metal hand.

“Sweetheart, I will bet anything you ask for,” Bucky assured him, brushing his thumb across Steve’s cheek. “That we’re fighting because you won’t do for yourself what you want to do for me.”

All the air went out of Steve.

“I doubt I care much about Tony,” Bucky said wryly, “but I bet I’m trying to keep you here because I know you miss him. I know I don’t blame you for anything that’s happened to me, but I’m damn sure you won’t let me forgive you for it.”

“Be fair,” Steve said, and met Bucky’s eyes. The muscles in Steve’s jaw flexed. “We’re fighting because you won’t forgive yourself, either.”

“I’m not the me I was last week,” Bucky said, smoothing his hand along Steve’s temple and pressing close, and Steve gave in with a shudder, hands tight on Bucky’s waist and his face buried in Bucky’s neck. “But I’m the me I am now. I know who you are and I know we’re fighting about who gets to give and hurt the most.” 

Steve’s fingers brushed the skin at his waist, yanked away, then came back like Steve couldn’t help himself. Bucky swallowed and his heart sped up. “Stevie, I’m yours. If you want me, I’m yours. I love you.”

“I don't deserve you,” Steve said into his neck, but his hands were under Buck’s shirt, now, hot and desperate. Bucky was sure his grip was leaving bruises. “I’m going to lose you.”

“You have me,” Bucky whispered back. His thumb brushed the corner of Steve’s frown, and Steve shivered again. “No one is taking me, and I’m never leaving. I’m with you, baby.” 

And Steve _broke_.

Bucky’s hand clenched in Steve’s hair as he scooped Bucky up in one swift movement, slamming him down onto the table. It knocked the air out of Bucky in a sharp gasp, and he yanked Steve’s head down, hard. Steve crushed him to the tabletop, rucking Bucky’s shirt up so it was twisted around his shoulders. 

“Yeah,” Bucky breathed, hooking his legs around Steve’s waist. Steve tried to get his tight athletic undershirt off as fast as he could without separating them an inch—Bucky heard the fabric tear as seams gave. “Stevie, _yes_.”

“I love you,” Steve groaned, wrenching Bucky’s fly open between them, teeth tantalizingly close to Bucky’s ear. “Buck, I love you.”

Bucky tried to arch up, but Steve had him pressed tight against the wood grain and he couldn’t move. His breathing went heavy. “I know you do, honey,” he panted, trying to pull Steve even closer. “I know. I love you too.”

“I can’t—” Steve cut himself off with a moan, rolling his hips against Bucky’s, and Bucky whimpered into his hair. “I can’t stand to—”

“You don’t gotta,” Bucky promised. Steve’s thigh was between Bucky’s legs and against his dick, now, and Bucky arched into it so hard he lifted them both off the tabletop before Steve slammed them back down again. Steve yanked Bucky’s jeans down over his hips, and Bucky hitched his knees up so Steve’s dick could press along the line of his ass through his uniform. “I’m not gonna leave you. I’m never gonna leave you.” 

“I’d let you go,” Steve swore, breath hot on Bucky’s neck, and ripped Bucky’s shirt apart before throwing it behind him. “If you wanted it, I’d let you go.”

“You don’t have to.” Bucky got a good grip on Steve’s hair, and hissed, “ _Mark me up, baby._

Steve’s eyes went dark. The table didn’t last long after that. 

They hit the floor with a crash, Steve’s teeth in Bucky’s shoulder and his nails dug deep into Bucky’s hips, and the dining set took even more damage when Steve broke one of the chairs scrabbling for purchase to grind back against Bucky. Bucky yanked the waistband of Steve’s uniform, and the buttons tore out the holes along the placket. 

“Fuck me,” Bucky gasped, and Steve bit his ear next. “Jesus, that feels so good. You feel so _good_ , honey, I need you in me, come on.”

Steve struck out blindly for the cupboards beside them. There was another splintering crunch, and the sound of plastic being crushed, and Steve moved up to get a slick hand between them. 

Bucky shouted and came all over both of them. 

There was a brief, surprised pause. Bucky watched a drop of jizz fall from Steve’s chin.

“I didn’t ask if I could come on your face, yet,” Bucky blurted, “I’m sorry. That was completely accidental. I was gonna try for that tomorrow morning.”

Steve stared at him, one hand still groping Bucky’s ass, the other pressing Bucky’s good shoulder into the broken tabletop, for one whole second before he doubled up laughing. “Oh my god,” Steve managed. It was only a little hysterical. “Oh my god, Bucky.”

“You left handprints from my ribs to my knees!” Bucky protested, twisting. “I couldn’t help it!”

“You were gonna wait until tomorrow to come on my face?” Steve asked, still laughing. “You were gonna _wait till tomorrow_. I am sitting here ready to stuff you full of vegetable oil on a smashed up table in the kitchen and you thought it was too early to shoot off on my face?”

“That shit is second date kind of behavior,” Bucky insisted. Steve was slumping back into him, giggling, and they were both slick and sticky and-- _oh. Hello._ Bucky’s dick twitched and he unthinkingly ground it back up against Steve.

Steve huffed another laugh, looked Bucky dead in the eye, and then _fucking licked the jizz off his mouth_.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Bucky wheezed, “Oh my god. I am back in the running already, oh my god. How many times can I do that?” Bucky flipped them both over so he was kneeling over Steve. The remains of the table made a sad crunching noise. “How many times can I do that in a row?”

“Uh,” Steve said. His eyes went half lidded and his pupils blew wide. Bucky trailed his hand through his mess and down Steve’s chest and Steve’s breathing stuttered back to quick pants. “We haven’t found out yet.”

“Haven’t found out because we haven’t tested it,” Bucky asked, lifting his sticky hand and sliding it behind his own balls, which made Steve turn red, “or because I don’t stop?”

Steve managed to give him a sardonic look through the dazed lust. “I want you to think for a minute about how many times I snuck a look at your ass just in the past day or so,” he said, “and then come back to that question.”

“We are not going to leave this apartment for the whole week,” Bucky promised, and pressed the tip of a finger into his ass. Steve stopped breathing altogether, eyes glued to it. “We are not sleeping until we drop from exhaustion tomorrow afternoon.”

“I mean,” Steve managed, still staring at Bucky’s fingers, “eventually you stop shooting as much out. And it gets kind of clear.”

“ _Stop it_ ,” Bucky admonished, pulling his hand out and smacking Steve on the arm. “You are killing the sexy. Get up and take me to a room with actual lube.”

“You just smacked me with the same hand you had up your ass,” Steve protested, but he obediently heaved them both off the mess of the kitchen and hitched Bucky higher on his waist.

“Fuck you, I’m a delight,” Bucky told him, and stuck his tongue in Steve’s mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SEX AND FIGHTING DELIVERED. SORRY IT WAS TERRIBLE SEX.
> 
> I would like to let everyone know that silentwalrus suggested the phrase "delivered his man yogurt" in this chapter, and although we decided not to use it, I thought it was important that it was recognized as the amazing stroke of genius it is.
> 
> I also wanna say THANK YOU for all the kudos and amazing, thoughtful comments this fic has gotten. Did I say already that this was languishing at one chapter for a year on my computer? I put it up, and your constant encouragement is what gave me the energy to blast it out. THANK YOU. This story would literally have never happened without you. I love the ao3 community SO MUCH. I never get anything other than super helpful ideas and blindingly thoughtful comments. You are amazing!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to apologize to anyone who is easily grossed out with bodily fluids in this chapter. 
> 
> Unfortunately I'm not sorry enough to take out the jokes about bodily fluids, because I'm an asshole.

Steve completely ignored the knock at the door.

“Steve,” Bucky said when the knock came again. “Steve, it’s clearly Natasha. That is obviously Natasha’s knock.”

Steve groaned, but kept his death grip on the pillow.

“You’re the one who jumps out of bed at the first hint of daylight,” Bucky grumbled, shoving Steve in the ribs. “I’m not getting the door like this. Not for _Natasha_.”

“Soldier, rest!” Steve mumbled into his shoulder. “Dream of battled fields no more, days of danger, nights of waking.”

Bucky blinked, then sat up. “That quote sure sounds like it’s actually about death,” he said slowly.

Steve shrugged.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “When you wake up a little more, we are going to talk about this.”

“Stoppit,” Steve groaned, pulling the pillow over his face. “We had the suicide talk already. I got therapy. Lemme sleep.”

“We _what_?” Bucky asked, incredulous, and Natasha banged on the door in a way that said _very clearly_ she was losing her patience with them at—Bucky squinted at the bedside clock—two goddamn thirty in the morning.

“We are _definitely talking about this_ ,” Bucky hissed, but he gave in and stumbled out of bed. 

When he opened the door, Natasha paused and looked him over. Twice.

“Are you _allergic_ to using _words_ ,” Bucky complained, squinting at her. The LED lighting in the hallway was too damn bright. He put his arm up to block it. “If you’re going to wake me up in the middle of the night, can you please use _words_.”

“Gee,” she said, mechanically, “I sure am noticing how much sex you had last night.”

“Really, Sherlock?” Bucky asked, distracted from squinting. “Steve chewed up my neck and clawed off half my back, and whatever parts of us aren’t covered in bruises are covered in dried jizz instead. I can’t imagine where you get your insights from.”

“You’re also answering the door completely naked and you left the condom on,” Natasha added. “That was a clue, too. Do you guys even need condoms?”

“Steve doesn’t like come drooling out of his ass the way I do,” Bucky said without thinking, then looked down. “Okay,” he admitted, “that’s disgusting.”

Natasha nodded. “Yeah, I’m not going to argue with you on that one.”

“How did I not notice this sooner? Come in so I can use the bathroom.” He staggered back into the apartments. “Ugh. I feel like my dick wants to crawl out of my skin, now.”

“I’m guessing it was the I’m-terrified-I’ll-lose-you-again sex Steve hit you with last night,” Natasha offered, following him down the hall. “That seems like it would have the strength to knock you back pretty hard.”

“And how. Why do you think I’m limping?” Bucky agreed, finally making it to the bathroom and leering at her over his shoulder. She made a face, then leaned forward to pull the door shut between them. “Tony filled you in, yeah?” Bucky peeled the absolutely nauseating condom off, gritted his teeth, and scrubbed his dick down with a washcloth.

Natasha’s disdain was palpable even without the look Bucky knew went with it. “I don’t need Tony to fill me in on arguments where one of the participants throws a door, James.”

“I am trying to sleep,” Steve shouted from the bedroom.

“Then don’t throw doors,” Natasha shouted back.

“Princess isn’t moving for another two hours,” Bucky said, rooting through the laundry basket near the dryer and pulling on a pair of clean underwear. “At which point he will leap fully awake into the air and insist I do the same.”

“I’m not here for Steve,” Natasha told him. “I’m here for you. I need you to help me booby trap the guest apartment above this one so no more Hydra teams can rappel into your windows again.”

Bucky stared at her, then looked very pointedly at the hall clock. Natasha didn’t twitch. Bucky put on his best miserable face. “I’m going to get flakes of dried jizz all over the carpet,” he tried.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Every apartment has whatever Tony is calling his Roomba redesigns. I think it can handle it.”

“Ugh,” Bucky groaned. “Fine. But I’m blaming you when Tony finds out and gets pissy about it.”

***

“Hold this,” Natasha said, handing him what looked like a grain of rice  on a cobweb, then frowned. “No, wait, go wash your hands again, then hold this.”

“They’ve only been up Steve’s ass,” Bucky offered, waving his hands at her. She backed away in disgust. “And mine. They’re supersoldier asses, they’re probably filled with healthy antibodies.”

“You’re gross, James.” Natasha climbed the wall using a spindly side table and probably magic, sticking the rice thingie into the corner of the window herself. “You should probably get rid of that when you let Tony remake you.”

Bucky tripped on his own feet heading to the kitchen sink. Natasha did…not mess around. He swallowed and tried to recover. “Yeah? What else should I drop?”

“What else should you have _Tony_ drop,” Natasha corrected, and it sounded like she was on the ceiling, somehow. It was definitely magic. “Probably that selfish streak where you want everyone else to cook for you. Put the cooking back in after all.”

Bucky frowned, soaping up. “So I take it you don’t think I should do this.”

Natasha made a banging sound and Bucky heard drywall crunch. “I never said that.”

“No,” Bucky agreed, rolling his eyes, then rinsed and dried his hands on the fancy towels. Some tiny part of him inside kept marveling at how classy everything in the Tower was. “Of course not.”

“You should get rid of that sarcasm, too,” Natasha told him when he came back out. She was clearly defying gravity. He had no idea how she was doing it. “If you're making a new person and all.”

Bucky paused. “That's not what I'm doing.”

Natasha was braced with a foot on either side of a corner and a hand in the ceiling, fitting something into the light fixture, but she twisted like a cat and gave him a condescending look. “Of course that's what you're doing.”

Bucky chewed on his lip. “Natasha,” he said quietly, “I woke up an hour before you came over because I was reliving what it felt like to break a teenager’s neck.”

“Sure.” Natasha dropped down beside him and leaned in just enough to brush his shoulder with hers. Fair enough, since he was still pretty disgusting. “I do that too. I think setting the hospital on fire comes back the most.”

“Shit,” he managed. “Shit, Natasha, I—“

“So every time it starts, I change it.” Natasha’s voice went cold, hard, and the look in her eyes would have been terrifying if it had been directed at him. “I turn on the men with me instead. My handler has a gun; I break his wrist and crush the other’s face with a rock until it’s red and pulpy. Then I rip my handler’s throat out with my teeth and stuff his body into the trash.”

Bucky frowned. That sounded _extremely satisfying_ , but, “That’s what I’m doing,” he protested. “I’m changing it, too.”

“No you're not,” Natasha countered. “You're erasing it.”

“How is it different?” Bucky asked, frustrated. “Killing your handlers wasn’t real.”

“No,” She agreed. “I was entirely their creature. They controlled me. I did what they wanted and I burned down a building full of little kids and their grandparents.”

Bucky was silent.

“But,” she continued, “they don’t control me now. I could hurt them, now.” Her lips curled up in a chilling smile. “They wanted to make me a monster, and it worked. But now I’m a bigger, scarier horror than they were. You are, too.”

Bucky rubbed his face. “So stay miserable but play pretend. That’s your advice.”

Natasha slid her arm around his waist and wrapped her fingers around his hip. “We are as terrifying as we are valuable, James. There will always be someone who wants to use us. What would you do differently if you had another chance?”

“Christ,” he breathed. “Everything. What would you do?”

“What I _did_.” She smiled, grim and final. “I dropped their ships, shattered and burning, into the Potomac and scattered their closest secrets through the mud of the internet. Then I tracked down every splintered remnant and crushed them beneath my heel.”

“I hear you’ve had a _little_ help with that,” Bucky murmured.

“Yeah, and let me tell you, contractors ruin everything. Steve won’t let me rip anyone’s throat out with my teeth,” she complained. “But it’s satisfying nonetheless.”

Bucky stayed quiet.

“Stop thinking about what you did while they controlled you,” Natasha suggested. “Start thinking about what you can do now that they don’t.”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment, and blew out a long breath. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Also you should probably take an actual shower.” She wrinkled her nose. “You still smell like a three day orgy.”

Bucky barked out a laugh. “Thanks.”

“Orgies stink. In case you didn’t realize. I’m saying you stink. Just use this shower, you’re getting sex funk everywhere.”

“Got it.”

***

Bucky wasn’t quite ready to head back to the apartment, after, so he took the elevator up to the roof with the vague idea of brooding romantically while watching the sunrise. It was a good image, but it was ruined by the sound of the door behind him before he’d gotten a really good mope going.

“Does _everyone_ want to talk to me about my brain now?” Bucky asked once he’d placed the expensive tread of Tony’s leather shoes. “Is that Sam guy gonna show up today, too?”

“I mean,” said Tony from behind him, “probably. It seems like the kind of thing he’d have an opinion on.” 

“If Steve finds out you came out here to talk to me about this again, he’s going to blow a gasket,” Buck warned him, still not looking around.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony said, strolling over to stand at the lip of the roof with him. “We’re just up here watching this beautiful sunrise together like the enemies-turned-sort-of-friends we are. We should probably be holding hands to really feel the beauty of the moment. Wanna hold hands, Sweetums?”

Bucky gave that comment the look it deserved. “Yeah. That’s gonna make Steve happier about it. He’s gonna throw the door at your head, this time.”

Tony shrugged in agreement. “Look, though. He doesn’t _own you_.”

“I know,” Bucky said, turning back to the railing.

“He doesn’t get to decide what’s best for you,” Tony continued, vehement. “I’m not wrong. You could be happy. You could be different. This is your chance.”

“I know,” Bucky repeated, picking a chip of paint loose from the metal and watching it flutter out of sight over the edge.

Tony seemed thrown by the agreement. He deflated. “But you’re going to let him decide for you anyway, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know yet,” Bucky admitted, scratching at the paint again. “But it seems fair, doesn't it? Seeing as I wanted to let what he _should_ want decide for me before.”

“ _Or_ , you could just decide for _you_ ,” Tony pointed out, frustrated. “Not everything is about Steve.”

“Sure it is,” Bucky turned, his back to the city, and looked over at him. “I just got done with a conversation with Natasha, and she told me I’m as valuable as I am dangerous. It’s got me wondering. If I cut out the monster, who’s gonna have to pick it up to keep me safe?” Tony looked a little green, and Bucky smiled without humor and raised an eyebrow. “Look at you,” Bucky said, “you know it's gonna be Steve, too.”

“That’s not fair,” Tony shot back, yanking off his sunglasses. “That’s not on you.” He narrowed his eyes, trying to figure something out from Bucky’s face. Good luck with that, Bucky thought, he had enough Winter Soldier back that not much was going to get through. “But you know that,” Stark said, backing away in defeat.

They stood like that for a while, and Bucky was almost ready to head back in when Tony said, “I didn’t know you were here for me.”

Bucky laughed. “I don’t really think I was,” he admitted, smiling at Tony sympathetically. “I think I was here for him. You were just what he wanted to fix the most.”

Tony nodded, preoccupied, and Bucky left him to brood instead.

***

When Bucky got back to the guest apartments again, he thought Steve must be out. The lights were all off, and he didn't hear anyone puttering around like he generally did; toddlers with toilet issues were better than Steve was at sitting still. Bucky should have at least heard a pencil moving, but the place was silent until he was close enough to the bedroom to hear breathing. 

He got a tight feeling in his chest when he saw the lump still under the blankets, and he toed off his shoes and padded inside.

“Hey,” Bucky murmured, sliding in under the covers to join Steve. “Still in bed?”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, not moving. He was clean, and so was the bed, which meant he had gotten up, showered and changed the sheets, then apparently looked at them and decided that fuck everything, he wasn’t getting up after all.

The feeling in Bucky’s chest wound tighter.

He shuffled over and pulled Steve to him. Steve went easily, but he didn’t turn around. “That’s not like you,” Bucky offered, stroking Steve’s arm. Steve didn't shrug him off, but he didn't react. Also not a good sign. 

“No,” Steve agreed again. They lay in silence for a long moment, and Bucky could feel Steve thinking. “The last time we talked about modifying your memories,” Steve said, “you tried to make me promise to kill you before I let anyone reprogram you again.”

As conversation starters went, that one was a bust. Bucky struggled for a response.

“But if you want to cut out everything that hurts,” Steve croaked before Bucky had a chance to answer, “I’ll help you. I can’t even pretend otherwise. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but Buck,” his breath caught. “Anything you need from me is yours.”

“Shit,” Bucky breathed. “Fuck. Steve, you can’t even let the easy way just be the easy way, can you?”

“I'm sorry,” Steve whispered, rolling over and burying his face in Bucky’s shirt. “I can't help it.”

“Just, Steve, it’s not just me who’s happier when I forget,” Bucky said, his nose in Steve’s hair. “You are too. I'm so easy to love, then.”

“I love you when it's hard, too,” Steve said simply. He had his arms around Bucky, his grip tight, layering new bruises on the ones he’d put there last night. Bucky hadn’t minded then, and he didn’t mind now, but the desperation that kept Steve doing it hurt a little. “I'm not trying to talk you out of this, though. Whatever you want.”

“No,” Bucky said. “No, you're just stepping back to let me talk myself out of it instead.”

Steve huffed a small laugh. “Well,” he said, smiling a little against Bucky’s chest. “I'm not sorry about that.”

Bucky laughed too. He took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “Shit. You’re right. I don’t actually want to do this. I want myself back.”

Steve looked up at that, happy and hopeful. “Yeah?” he asked, reaching up to touch Bucky’s face. “You don't gotta, though. You don’t have to decide to be unhappy because of what I want. I want you choose what you want.”

“I know. Fuck. But they're my fucking memories, aren't they? They're mine. If I want to change, that's mine, too.” Bucky ran his fingers through Steve’s hair, restless. “I don’t want Hydra to change me. But I don't want Tony to change me, and you don’t get to either. I change me. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed in a watery voice. “Yeah, that’s yours.”

“Oh my god,” Bucky said, pushing Steve in the shoulder. Steve didn’t budge, just laid there looking tearfully besotted. “Stop it, stop looking at me like that.”

Steve kissed him sweetly.

“Augh, no, cut it out with the feelings,” Bucky complained, shoving at him. “I’ve had a really good brood on all day, I’ve been sulking manfully about this since Natasha woke me up, you’re messing up my whole _thing_ , Steve.”

“I love you,” Steve told him, still smiling damply like the _enormous dope he was_. 

“Shut up,” Bucky said, then, “I love you too. Whatever. You need to get me that stupid brain chair, now, you can’t just lie around in bed all day.”

Steve groaned, flopped over onto his back, and covered his face with his massive bicep.

“We could talk about the suicide thing instead,” Bucky offered. 

Steve lowered his arm enough to slant him a look. “I’d rather not. I told you I got therapy. I’m fine now.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how therapy works,” Bucky said.

“Ugh,” Steve said, dragging himself from the bed. “Fine. I’ll get you your stupid brain chair.”

“This talk is coming,” Bucky warned him, rolling over to watch Steve pull open the closet doors and struggle into another pair of his heavy blue super pants. “You can’t run away from it for long.”

“I can run away today, though,” Steve said cheerfully, and ducked over to drop another kiss onto Bucky’s hair before going back to the closet for an undershirt.

***

_Squeak._

Bucky narrowed his eyes and twisted in Tony’s swanky ergonomic rolling leather chair a few times. It squeaked again.

He wondered if the brain chair would squeak, too. 

He twisted again, just to see if he’d worked the squeak out.

_Squeak._

Nope.

He sighed and spun back around, getting comfortable. There were pens scattered in the mess of the lab table he propped his feet up on, and he took one to fidget with.

 _Click_ , went the pen.

_Click._

_Click click click click click_ , “Tony,” Bucky said, “what if Friday just quick hacked into that CIA base and rifled through everyone’s correspondence again. Just in case.”

“I don't know,” Tony exploded, throwing the bundle of wires and circuits he’d been working on into the air, clearly giving up on doing anything while Bucky was around. “Probably you would _ask her to do it again in five more goddamn minutes._ ”

“It’s just.” Bucky bit his lip and gave the pen a few more clicks. Tony’s eye twitched each time. “It just seems like this sort of thing shouldn’t be so easy.”

“Easy? Easy. It’s not _easy_.” Tony started wandering around the workshop tossing things from one corner to the next. Bucky guessed he was trying to clean up, but he was just making new messes. “They have unquestioned transport because we stole Nazi hovercraft and had them lying around from the last time you got the shit kicked out of you. They are getting in unnoticed because I’ve invented a newer, better facial mimicking skin that bypasses my own security through a backdoor I programmed into it just in case. They’re going to get the chair out because Steve and his outlandishly overclocked bio-engineered muscles can truck it out on his back at full speed like a giant human forklift. It’s not _easy_.”

“But,” Bucky said, “so what if, just maybe, Friday looks at everything again.”

“I have come right back around to hating you again,” Tony assured him, pointing something that looked like a cross between a wrench and a spatula at Bucky’s nose. “I want the Winter Soldier back.”

“You don’t even have to do it,” Bucky wheedled. “It’s not even you. You just have to ask Friday and she’ll tell me everything’s fine again.”

“They’re in the base. They’re there. No communication is going in or out!” Tony threw a metal leg with a pogo stick on the bottom into the trash compactor in the wall. “Even if we found something, we can’t do jack about it.”

“Please?” Bucky said. “Please?”

“For the love of god, _fine_ , Friday, sift through the detritus of 560-something lives and see if anything magically stands out,” Tony shouted at the ceiling, and flopped into the couch near Bucky. “You’re actually making me nervous, and we are _superheroes_ , Barnes. If anyone is going to be fine it’s—” He paused, looking at the screen that popped up in front of him. “Huh.”

“What do you mean, ‘huh’?” Bucky yelped, scrambling out of the fucking spring-loaded chair so fast he almost fell on his ass. “What is ‘huh’? What’s wrong?”

“Friday,” Tony said, ignoring him, “give me the one sent yesterday.”

“Sure, boss,” Friday replied.

“ _Which one sent yesterday_?”

Tony turned the screen so Bucky could see it, and Bucky nearly puked up his own heart falling over himself to look at it. He yanked the side to face him more clearly, and stared in thunderstruck terror at…

A Moana themed, animated birthday invite for a three year old princess party with play dough art crafts. Little shooting stars drifted across the glittering background.

It started playing a song about coconuts.

“ _You asshole_ ,” Bucky yelled at Tony. “You _asshole_. I just nearly tasted my own _intestines_.”

“I think I have a mole,” Tony said, turning the screen to look at it again. “Shit.”

“ _Is your mole an animated chicken_ ,” Bucky shouted.

“No,” Tony said, “Really. I think I have a mole. Look at these.” He pulled up another, identical party invite. “This one was just sent out just now. And _this_ one was yesterday before you distracted Steve with your wily, slutty ways.”

“ _You_ distracted him with re-engineering my Swiss cheese brain,” Bucky countered, but his heart sped back up again. “ _I_ distracted him from _murdering you_ with my wily, slutty ways. And what’s special about this? It’s just a correction. They just changed the…” Bucky trailed off and his mouth went dry.

“They just changed the date and time,” Tony said. “By about the same amount of time Steve pushed back the retrieval mission breaking all my furniture with your backside.”

Bucky started hyperventilating. “But who knew? Steve and Natasha went by themselves, we didn’t tell anyone! _Who could have known?_ ”

“The Black Widow doesn’t fuel up the stealth jet by herself,” Tony said, frowning and tapping the screen. “There’s enough that happens before they run out to crack heads that someone well-placed could put it all together.”

“Tony,” Bucky said, and his voice was small. “Tony. I need you to put my arm back on.”

“What?” Tony’s attention snapped back up to Bucky. “No. No way. Steve will actually, literally kill me if I let you go in there. We are on the thinnest of ice with him as it is. Did the amnesia totally wipe everything beyond weird millennial trivia? If Hydra gets its tentacles on you—”

“You can’t go,” Bucky said, staring at the screen now. “You can’t go tell them; if you get caught, the government doesn’t know it’s Nazis this time. You’ll be attacking the same base you bribed them with to get Steve in the country. What are they gonna think?”

Tony made a face.

“I gotta go,” Bucky pleaded. “I took out half a dozen of these guys in Steve’s jammies a week ago. I can do this.”

“No way. No way!” Tony was gesticulating wildly, hair everywhere. “Whether the good guys OR the bad guys find you there, you’re going to be fucked. Steve is going to rip apart the world to save you, and he’s going to be fucked. And when we end up with another damned worldwide bitch fit about superpowered humans, we’re _all_ fucked. When I say no, that is a stern, educated, well-reasoned, rock solid no.”

“Look,” Bucky said, turning the screen back to Tony and pointing at the sparkly blue invite. “Hydra used me for decades despite what a huge resource and staff sinkhole I was. They can’t get me or my memories here—I’m too well defended, especially now that they’ve tried it already. _But who else does the new rewrite technology work on?_ ”

“Shit,” Tony said. “Fuck. It works on Steve.” He levered himself up and started sorting through his junk piles again. “Shit. We can get in, but they’re going to figure out we’re there. We can’t get out quietly without something to convince them the fight isn’t worth it, and we don’t have the _firepower_ without my suit, which I can’t have anyone see… Shit. Okay. I can solve this. I can do this.” He pointed at Bucky. “Stay here. I’m gonna be right back.”

Bucky watched him go. He drummed his fingers on the frame of the digital screen, then looked over at the brain chip. It was still sitting in the custom case, and he was almost definitely imagining the creepy blue light peeking out along the edge of the weird lego bit. 

He drummed his fingers a few more times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is how the editing process works. For reference, we are talking about this line:
>
>> “Steve doesn’t like come drooling out of his ass the way I do,” Bucky said without thinking, then looked down. “Okay,” he admitted, “that’s disgusting.”
> 
> Quietnight: sldkflsdkfhlds omg i just re-read this and realized now it sounds like he's literally watching come drooling out of his ass RIGHT THERE SDKLFSLDLDSF IM DYING  
> Me: OH NO  
> Me: THAT'S A STEP TOO FAR EVEN FOR ME  
> Me: Hold on lemme change it *Makes it say "Okay, this condom is disgusting"*  
> Me: Wait I said 'condom' too many times in a row now. I have to change it back.  
> Quietnight: THIS IS SUCH A DILEMMA AND I AM USELESS ALL I CAN DO IS LAUGH AND LAUGH  
> Me: You know what  
> Me: Fuck it  
> Me: Maybe he has come drooling out of his ass through this whole scene.  
> Me: I'm okay with that.  
> Quietnight: WHY THE FUCK NOT 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said this was going to be the last real chapter, and 9 would just be an epilogue.
> 
> I lied.
> 
> I'm sorry.
> 
> IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN WHAT TONY AND BUCKY'S MAKEUP LOOKS LIKE: <http://cephalopodvictorious.tumblr.com/post/165197322298/actuallyrandomrpgideas-charleypollard>

“How do you do this? How do 1940’s era supersoldiers always talk me into these things?” Tony swerved around a lonely station wagon that was already driving at least fifteen over the speed limit. “We don’t have my suit. We don’t have your memories. Steve and Natasha are _superheroes_ , they’re going to be fine even if it is a trap. We, on the other hand, run a high risk of being caught, having all our assets seized, and thrown in a dark hole. We are both fucked.” 

“We’re both _fucking stupid_ ,” Bucky replied, squirming on the back of the hovercraft. Natasha had brought back three to start out with, which meant only one had been left for Bucky and Tony. Tony’s ass might be the size of a nickel, but Bucky’s sure as hell wasn’t, which meant it was a little cramped. “I look like a barcode that got ambushed at Hot Topic. How is this going to help?” He scratched at the greasepaint obscuring the line of his chin, and his fingernails came away a deep, sticky blue. “And you didn’t have to come with me. I would be a lot more comfortable NOT wedged on here with your ass in my crotch.”

Tony had gone on a field day with Bucky’s face. There were little multicolored squares all over one eye, two huge, bizarrely outlined splotches on each cheek, and a bright white line twisting like a Stay-Puft marshmallow river meandering from his forehead to his neck. Midnight blue splotches made the eyes tilt his jaw into something that belonged in a Disney movie about Notre Dame. 

This all meant that Bucky looked super cool and attractive, if you were into makeup done by enthusiastic preschoolers. Tony had topped it all off with multicolored hair extensions and weird gelled spikes that got in his eyes. Bucky’s only consolation was that Tony looked just as stupid.

“My ass is fantastic, you should be so lucky. And of course I had to come, Sir Pukesalot. What happens when you kill a Nazi and freak out again?” Tony jumped the median to take an exit on the opposite side of the highway, and Bucky worked hard at not living up to his newest nickname. “I didn’t put these radios in our helmets to listen to you complain the whole way there. No one can see you through your visor, and when we stop we’re going to be wearing the old morph masks. Quit whining.” 

“You said the old morph masks don’t work!” Tony had somehow disguised the hovercraft to look like a motorcycle while they took it on public roads, but Bucky was pretty sure the whole thing was being undermined by what Tony was doing with it. Motorcycles didn’t _move_ this way. “And you think strolling in front of the cameras dolled up like extras from a dystopian sci-fi B movie is going to avoid attention?”

“The old morph masks _work_ , they just don’t fool the facial recognition I have in place.” Tony sped along the inside wall of a traffic tunnel and Bucky seriously considered keeping his eyes shut for the rest of the trip. “We’ll look like completely average nobodies with the masks, and when the system sees through it to the makeup, they won’t freak out and they won’t have video record of Tony Stark and the Winter Soldier breaking into a secure facility.”

Bucky chewed on that for a moment. “You made a system advanced enough to see through an incredibly rare, unbelievably expensive electronic device, but at the same time can’t handle clown makeup.”

“Hey,” Tony shot back, “The frameup that sent the world on an international manhunt for _you_ only took a wig and a fake nose, so tone down the attitude. And sure. The government asked for a system that protected against even the most obscure threats, I gave them a system that protected against obscure threats.”

“It’s like you’re an evil genie,” Bucky said, impressed. “It’s like they never read the Monkey’s Paw.”

“It’s like I happily handed over all the technology they needed to make a helicarrier system that could kill half the population in fifteen minutes without making any backup plans, so they got used to me giving them completely effective tech without question,” Tony corrected. “It’s like I cha-cha when they say jump, but when they say ‘don’t jump’ I go right where they want me.”

“Aw,” Bucky said, “Look at you, being honest and everything. Maybe you should do that with Steve.”

“Maybe I should knock you off the back of this hovercraft,” Tony said. “I’m turning off my radio.”

***

They’d been careening along an abandoned dirt road for about fifteen minutes when a razor wire fence loomed into view, with a solitary checkpoint booth beside the gate. Tony slowed down. 

The guard manning the booth slid open the window while another came around to meet them, and Bucky felt his heart speed up. _I’ve done this a million times_ , Bucky thought, which didn’t help much considering he could only remember one of them. It had involved Steve, a stray dog, and four WAC wardrobes of drag, and it had _not_ gone well.

Bucky tried not to sweat off his greasepaint.

Tony flashed the pass Friday had printed for them and flipped the visor of his helmet up. Bucky pressed the button in his sleeve to activate the morph mask and hurried to do the same.

Except he couldn’t find the pass. Shit. _He couldn’t find his pass_.

After a moment of frantic self-groping, Tony turned fully around in the seat. “Did you lose your damn pass _again_ , David?” he asked, the exasperation probably not even faked. 

Bucky glared at him, and he wasn’t faking that, either. “I have about 35 pockets on this uniform, I didn’t _lose_ it. I _have_ it, I just can’t remember which pocket I have it in, _Daniel_.”

“You look like an idiot,” Tony assured him. “You look like you’re doing the Macarena. Do you remember the Macarena? Are you old enough to remember the Macarena?”

“Yeah, and _you_ look like an idiot just raising your faceplate,” Bucky said. “Guess I’m trying to level the—ah! Here. Pass.” He handed the pass to the guard in triumph. She squinted down at it, then at his face, but apparently the morph mask was working. No comment on digital clown makeup.

“What happened to your hovercraft?” The guard asked, looking suspicious.

Bucky looked down. “I’m…riding it?”

“Yes, I can see that. What happened to the _other_ hovercraft, Agent Smith?” The guard in the booth was moving in a way that triggered images of semiautomatics in Bucky’s brain.

Bucky panicked.

“Why would you ask that?” Bucky said, indignant. “It’s none of your business why we have one hovercraft. We have passes. We have every right to be there. It’s our superior officer’s business why we don’t have a hovercraft. I don’t have to deal with telling this damn story twice, lady, I’m pissed off enough as it is.”

“Hey,” Tony said. “Calm the fuck down, David. It’s not her fault you’re a constant fuckup. We’re on the same side, here.”

“ _Fuck_ you!” Bucky exclaimed, turning back to Tony. “It’s not even my fault there are two of us on this hovercraft! Why don’t _you_ tell them why I don’t have a hovercraft, Daniel?”

“How is it _my_ fault you wrecked your fucking hovercraft?” Tony’s voice went up a little. “You think I put that deer there? You think I have magic deer controlling powers and put a deer in your goddamn way?”

“You’re the asshole who wouldn’t let me use my brights!” Bucky shouted. “I am going to get in _so much shit_ for this, and if I had been able to _see_ the deer, I wouldn’t have _plowed right through it!_ ”

“If you… plowed through a deer,” The guard interjected, calmed but still unconvinced, “where’s the blood?”

Bucky turned on her. “Where’s the blood?” He echoed, incredulous. “Where’s the _blood_? You get hit with a lot more than _blood_ when you hit a deer at 60 miles an hour, lady! I’m wearing my second uniform and I had to use the entire pack of wet wipes in my kit to get my helmet clean. You think I’m going to just drive around covered in deer viscera?”

“ _Calm down_ , David, for fucks sake, you’re getting hysterical and you’re not even talking to Sanders yet,” Tony admonished. He turned to the guard. “I’m sorry, he was raised by raccoons. He’s not wrong, he’s going to be in deep shit and he doesn’t have any more chances,” Tony turned back to glare at him, “because he’s a constant _fuckup_.”

“I am _not_ a fuckup!” Bucky started, but the guard rolled her eyes and motioned them on. 

“Don’t forget to be out of here by three,” she said as they motored by.

“I don’t need the _reminder_ , thanks,” Bucky snapped.

“ _You clearly do_ ,” Tony told him, and then they were beyond the checkpoint and driving up to a squat, ugly building that seemed to sprawl across way too much of the hill they were on.

“Actually I guess I do need the reminder,” Bucky said after a moment. “I have no idea what she was talking about.”

“Well, we’re sure going to find out, since half an hour isn’t a lot of time,” Tony said, pulling to a stop and parking the hovercraft alongside a neat row of them. “Good job on the redirection, by the way—in retrospect, ‘Why are you two crammed on one hovercraft like a homoerotic Nazi pinup’ should have been a question we planned for.”

“Lucky you almost hit a deer for real and we had a story ready,” Bucky agreed, standing and shaking the feeling back into his legs. He could see the craft he’d ridden on with Natasha—which meant Steve was still in the building. The guards at the checkpoint should have been a lot more concerned if Captain America and the Black Widow were in the building, shouldn’t they? Steve and Natasha were good, but it had been an hour or so since they were scheduled to enter. They must have had to kill a _few_ Nazis in that time, right?

Right?

Tony quickly entered the code Friday had given them on the keypad on the front door, and they ducked inside. Bucky had been expecting to be surprised again. He’d been thrown off in the Hydra base, so it naturally followed that this would defy expectations as well, but apparently secret military bases tended to look similar. It only lacked the tasteful décor of freshly bludgeoned Nazi corpses littering every available surface.

In fact, that part was actually kind of weird. “Where are all the people?” Bucky wondered, after a few minutes meandering empty halls. “There were tons of people here last time Friday went through the files. We haven't run into anyone.”

“Yeah,” Tony agreed. Every step they took echoed. The last place had echoed, too, but it was a lot creepier without anyone around. “Yeah, it's getting me really worried about 3 o'clock.”

“This is all really--” Bucky’s head snapped up. 

There were footsteps in the distance, coming fast, and they weren't Steve's. 

He didn't think about it. Bucky had shoved the ceiling tile out of the way, crammed Tony through the hole, and climbed up himself before he even knew what he was doing. If he’d thought about it, he probably would have asked Tony for permission, first—Bucky put the tile back with shaking hands and tried to ignore how Tony’s face was turning a bright, furious purple where Bucky had stuffed him in bent double and upside-down.

“ _What the hell are you doing?_ ” Tony hissed, looking equal parts apopleptic and uncomfortable. He had to contort even further to keep from eating his knee when he talked. 

“I have no idea!” Bucky hissed back, well into a full-on panic. “I heard footsteps and I didn't even think!”

“We're in uniform!” Tony said, furious. “We would have been exactly where we were supposed to be! Now we are _clearly_ up to no good, and the building can see us!”

“What if they let us in so we'd be caught in the trap, too?” Bucky whispered, frantic. “What if...” he trailed off. “Tony?”

“Huh,” Tony said, looking at something behind him. Bucky craned his neck and tried to twist enough to look in the tiny crawlspace. He couldn’t quite manage it, but what he did see was large, shiny, and covered in multicolored wires. 

“That’s a bomb,” Tony decided after a minute of frozen staring. “That’s...a very big bomb.”

“Oh, for the love of _shit_ ,” Bucky said. 

***

“It makes sense,” Tony shouted over his shoulder as they careened down another corridor. The chair was in the lowest level, so they were hoping Steve and Natasha would either be there or en route back from it. Bucky and Tony just had to find them, get them to stop, explain the situation, and get everyone back out without running into all the Hydra agents that wanted them to stay inside the building. 

In….seventeen minutes.

They were all going to die.

“It makes sense!” Tony repeated, skidding around a corner. “Hydra doesn’t have the _resources_ to capture Steve. They just don’t have the manpower! Bringing down a building on top of him makes _sense_ — he’s got a 50/50 chance of surviving it, and after you dig him back out he’ll be easy to manage. But if he doesn’t survive, well, no big deal, you’ve gotten rid of Captain America!” 

“Why couldn’t you just disarm it, again?” Bucky shouted back, racing after him. “Wouldn’t it be easier to disarm it that find Steve in a _literal_ maze in, what, _fifteen minutes_?”

“I am not explaining this to you again,” Tony wheezed. “It will be just as frustrating a second time. Suffice to say there is _more than one bomb_ and it’s not just a case of diddling some wires. Here, get this door coming up.”

“Where the fuck is he? How does he not hear us hitting these?” Buck asked, taking the lead to plow into a pair of locked double doors. They exploded open under his metal shoulder like cardboard. “And if it’s such a smart idea to just blow him up, why didn’t they try it before?”

“They never had a smart building capable of tracking his every move before!” Tony said, taking a hard right and heading down a flight of stairs. “They’re probably letting him get all the way down to the chair before everything blows, it’s what I would do. Fuck,” he managed, slamming up against another locked door. “Fuck, you’re right, we have fifteen minutes. We’re not gonna make it .”

“They know we’re here,” Bucky said, punching the door open. They ducked down another flight of stairs, because hey, maybe if they just ran _really fast_. “You said the building can see us. Why haven’t they just blown it ahead of schedule? I doubt they care about any stragglers left behind to distract Steve.”

“We’re not the main event,” Tony said. “They want…” He slowed. “We could be, though. You’re just as valuable. Why _haven’t_ they just blown the place?”

Bucky looked up at the ceiling. “I haven’t exactly made it a secret I have a superweapon for an arm,” he said under his breath. “They don't have proof, but they have a _really good guess_ who I am, even if they’re not certain about you.”

“Maybe neither of you are deep enough they can be sure you won’t get out in time,” Tony said, stopping to think. “Maybe there’s somewhere they’re trying to corral Steve, and they want _one_ of you to make it there first.”

“Maybe the sensors on the super spy building can pick up the whatever waves on my brain chip thing,” Bucky offered. “And they don’t want to risk breaking it since they’re not sure where I hid it.”

“Maybe the— _what_?” Tony squawked.

“You said it screamed so loud you can’t tell where it is sometimes,” Bucky explained helpfully. “They probably aren’t sure where I put it. Steve and I will be _terrible_ assets. Better than nothing, but if I killed a lot of resources, Steve is gonna be way worse. I bet they’d _much_ rather have the full Winter Soldier to stick into robots instead.”

“What the hell did you bring your _brain chip for?_ Tony asked, turning purple again. “Why did you think that was a good idea?”

“We needed something to keep them from following us out,” Bucky said. “I figure an Easter Egg hunt is pretty distracting. They can hear us too, right?”

“No,” Tony said slowly, horrified. “No, I didn’t set it up like that. They only have visual.”

“But they can pick up all outgoing calls, yeah?” Bucky started back in the direction they’d come. Tony, with the look of a man watching a car pileup in slow motion, followed. “You have a cell phone, right?” 

“It’s turned off,” Tony said, clearly seeing where this was going. “But we can turn it back on. What’s your plan for keeping them from sending in a few teams with grenades? What’s your plan for keeping them from gunning us down from a helicopter once we make it back outside?”

Bucky flashed a grin at him over his shoulder. “I was kind of hoping you would have a solution for that. But I thought maybe you could do something with the bombs?”

Tony stared at him. “You and Steve are made for each other,” he said after a long pause. “Yes. Fine. I can ‘do something with the bombs.’ Hold on a second and let me think.”

Bucky looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOKAY SO. I lied again about this being the last chapter. I'm just gonna stop promising you guys shit. I am made a liar every time. This happens on EVERY long fic I do. I give up.
> 
> UPSIDE I'M UPDATING so...yay?

As it turned out, even frantic rescue missions with _fifteen goddamn minutes before the whole building exploded_ still had a lot of ‘hurry up and wait.’ 

Bucky shrugged uncomfortably, trying to get Tony to shift and failing. Tony had flat out refused to be shoved back into the crawlspace near the bomb they’d found, so now he was dangling half in the ceiling, half standing on Bucky like a glorified cybernetic stepladder. Tony wasn’t nearly heavy enough to be a problem, but after twelve minutes of anxious waiting, Tony’s boots were starting to gouge a divot in Bucky’s shoulder he was too keyed up to ignore.

Steve was going to owe Bucky a _so much thank-you sex_ once they got back.

“Okay,” Tony said, and Bucky could hear him tapping the screen of his phone faster than seemed was possible. Tony had hastily stripped several wires trailing off the bomb and twisted them into some sort of connector he’d just happened to have in his pockets, and was going to town on a locked-down Hydra subsection of a super-encrypted government security system with two thumbs and hope. “Hydra knows I’m looking at it, but Friday can see where Steve and Natasha are. They’ve hit the bottom level. They’re with the chair.”

Bucky took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. Maybe the wire thing wasn’t even a bomb? It might not even be a bomb. There hadn’t been any clocks stuck on it, it wasn’t ticking or beeping—the only thing that said ‘bomb’ to him was a lot of wires, and really, he could have said the same of Steve’s home entertainment system. They might not even _be_ on a terrifying race against time to save the man he loved.

Of course, Tony _probably_ had a better idea of what a bomb looked like in real life than he did. “So we have three minutes left,” Bucky managed, the dread flooding back, “and I’m trying very hard to stay here and not run around in panicked, screaming circles, I hope you appreciate that.”

“Well thanks to me, we are also officially off the countdown, so relax,” Tony announced, and Bucky felt like all the air went out of him at once. The relief made him sag. “Hey!” Tony complained, trying to regain his balance. One leg almost kicked Bucky in the face. “Only as long as I’m plugged in and stopping it, so stiffen up, Buttercup!” Bucky jerked back upright and Tony cursed as he hit his head on a support. 

“What’s the plan, then?” Bucky asked, finally able to breathe again. “I feel like someone might show up to shoot us soon, honestly.”

“Nah,” Tony said, “not unless they’re even more suicidal than usual. I can set it off whenever I want, too, and they know it.”

Bucky digested that.

“Your master plan,” he guessed, “is going to be holding everything off by yourself until everyone else gets out, then you sitting pretty to blow everything up around your own ears, isn’t it?”

There was a surprised silence. Tony’s thumbs didn’t stop their furious tap-dance on his phone, but they paused for a beat.

“I…would…never suggest that,” Tony said eventually. “And I’m hurt by the accusation.”

“Look,” Bucky said, craning his neck to look up into the crawlspace. He couldn’t see much. “I plan to tie Steve to the bed and motorboat his tits at least twice after this jaunt, and I doubt he’ll be very into it if I run out on you while you take an explosion for the team. How about instead, we promise Hydra we’ll leave the chip in the building and tell them we set the bomb to go off and destroy it if one of us loses vital signs?”

Tony ducked his head down out of the gap and frowned. “Sure, we could do that and just _hope they’re idiots who take us at our word_.”

“I mean, yeah,” Bucky agreed. “But with my plan, I don’t have to shove you back in the crawlspace so I can leg it out.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, ducked back inside, and dialed something on his phone.

“Golden Dragon Chinese,” A tinny voice on the other end said, followed by a series of beeps and clicks, and then silence.

Bucky and Tony both waited.

“….hi? Hi!” said a confused, anxious voice. “Uh. Heil Hydra! You won’t be able to call for help! Surrender now!”

“Shut up,” Tony said, ducking his head out enough to give Bucky a ‘can you believe these assholes’ look. “I’m not calling _Golden Dragon Chinese_ for help, what’s wrong with you? Are you all they left? We’re _kind of a big deal_ , here. How old are you?”

“The surveillance equipment is all inside the building,” the hapless agent said, and even brain damaged, Bucky knew the kid probably shouldn’t have told them. How young was Hydra signing on nowadays? “Everyone else has evacuated. I’m sending out readings on your alien materials and getting my orders by walkie-talkie.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tony pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it before putting it back. “You’re kidding me. You guys are a _joke_. No wonder you’re so desperate.”

“We are burdened with glorious purpose,” the kid plagiarized loftily. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Look,” Tony told him, clambering down Bucky with the phone held between his shoulder and his cheek. Bucky got Tony’s ass shoved directly in his face at one point, and it was _not_ the experience it was when Steve did it. “You need a superweapon. We have, like, three here. Two of them are runners up, and the last one is hidden in the building. We’re all on track with this. Yes?”

“Yeah, sure,” the kid agreed. “I’m trying to get my boss to let me blow the place up and get all three at once, but he’s all ‘we don’t fully understand the structural properties of the supersoldier technology’ and ‘we will make every effort to successfully revitalize our organization without destroying our most powerful stronghold’ but like, fortune favors the brave, am I right? You gotta look straight in the horse’s mouth. You gotta put all your eggs in one basket.”

“No, stop, shut up shut up shut up,” Tony said again. “Jesus. You’re making my IQ fall just listening to you. Just tell them the chip’s hidden in the building and you have an hour to find it before I set everything to explode. It’ll go early if one of us gets killed, too.”

There was a pause on the other end, another click, and _the idiot didn’t even mute the call_. “Hey. Hey boss? They say they’re gonna blow everything up anyway. Can I—” a crackly, garbled voice cut the kid off. Apparently, they had two radios going so they could interrupt him if needed. Bucky grudgingly conceded that it was a good plan. “Yeah, but—” Another crackle, more insistent this time. “Well he says he’s leaving the chip but he’s gonna blow it all up if we spray them with canonfire at the door like you were—No, yeah, the readings say it’s in there somewhere, but—No but he says he’s gonna blow it up in an hour anyway! Can’t we just—”

Tony leaned against the wall and knocked his head against it a few times. 

“UGH, Fine!” the definitely-about-to-die teenager said. “Fine. Well, look, Captain America just ran out the door with our last mind wiping chair. You planning to—no? You could have had all three, now we’re just getting two! Alright, yeah, fine. Hey,” he continued, voice getting slightly louder as if he’d turned back to another set of controls. “You guys just stay there, we’re sending in a bunch of troops to look for the chip but they are definitely, totally going to leave you alone. My boss says to just let them run past you.” There was another click, and a soft dial tone.

Tony and Bucky exchanged a look.

“What do you want to bet,” Bucky said slowly, turning to look down the hall at the exit, “that the bottom-feeders they dredge up for the ‘run into the building seeded with bombs’ mission are not going to notice if we just hide behind the door as they come in?”

***

“I can’t believe that worked,” Bucky said, running away from the explosion like his ass was on fire. It might have been, actually, that shit was a lot hotter than he had expected. “I can’t believe that fucking worked.”

“I am honestly _amazed_ that we are alive,” Tony huffed, half running and half stumbling forward from the force of the blast. “I was really sure you were even dumber than they were.” 

“Tony, you are 100 percent correct, and I’m not even mad,” Bucky agreed, crashing through the tree line and trying to break a path for his face with the metal arm. It wasn’t working. The branches all just whipped back across his fingers and sliced bloody streaks through his facepaint. “I was definitely just lucky. How do that many people not notice a pair of bozos hiding behind the doorstops?”

They pelted through the underbrush until Tony was heaving the choking gasps of a regular human trying to keep up with an overengineered hydra murder rottweiler, and then took a quick break signaled by Tony flopping face first into a pile of dead leaves. Bucky pulled off the morph mask while he waited for Tony to recover or throw up. 

“What did you do with the chip?” Tony asked when he had enough breath back, pulling off his own mask after flipping over on his back to gasp more effectively. Bucky had almost forgotten how awful the facepaint looked, but seeing Tony without the mask _definitely_ reminded him. He winced. “How did you keep the sensors reading it so deep in the building the whole time? There’s no way you…actually…”

Tony’s head shot up, realization making his face go slack. Behind him, the fire was barely visible through the trees, a happy crackle that occasionally sent up another small explosion.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, feigning nonchalance. “The chip was definitely still in there. No real chance of turning back now, huh?”

“No,” Tony said, slowly lurching upright. “No, it would probably withstand a nuclear blast. Actually.”

“Oh.” Bucky frowned and looked at the fire.

It burped up another explosion.

Tony turned to follow his gaze. “Steve is going to kill me. He’s actually going to kill me. I thought he was going to when I blew your arm off, and I was a little worried when I wanted to write a newer, better you, but this time he’s actually going to do it.”

“Hey, wait,” Bucky said, glaring at him. “You blew my arm off?”

“I’m just gonna,” said Tony, stumbling back towards the enemy stronghold spouting flames, then changing his mind and walking very deliberately in another direction. “I just gotta. I gotta go to the little robots room.”

Bucky gave him a look. “We’re in the middle of the woods.”

“Bears pee in it!” Tony protested, wandering off. It wasn’t suspicious in _any way_. Bucky watched him disappear into foliage, shook his head, and picked his way after him.

***

A few minutes later, Tony finally stopped and took a deep breath. He flexed his hands, stared at the building in the distance, let the breath out, and went for the button on his Iron Man bracelet.

Bucky grabbed it from behind with his metal arm and held it over Tony’s head.

“Wh-- _hey_ ,” Tony shouted, his arm going with it. Bucky hadn’t thought that all the way through, but, upside, Tony wasn’t about to dive into an _exploding CIA weapons facility in full incendiary glory_ , so he figured it was a win. “I said I needed to take a leak!”

“I know I have brain damage, Tony,” Bucky said, “but I didn't realize the depths of how completely and unbelievably stupid you think I am. Take a leak? Really? In the woods? _You_?”

“We were in there for a while!” Tony protested, still dangling from Bucky’s arm. “I might have needed to go!”

“Bullshit,” Bucky said. 

“Look, fine, but your brain is still in there!” Tony shouted.

“My brain is right here!” Bucky said, pointing at his temple. “Where _yours_ is, I got no idea! Let’s ignore the _fire_ and talk about the sentry cameras they still have going. Do you remember what the federal government can do to you if they have proof that you smashed up their playpen? They get one picture of you and your company is gone, your assets are gone, and _you_ end up in an underwater prison without trial or hope of seeing those weird chlorophyll milkshakes ever again!”

“But I can fix this!” Tony said, apparently choosing dignity and yanking his arm out of the bracelet. He rubbed his wrist where it had bit into the skin. “I can—”

“You think every problem has to be solved with some kind of huge, awful sacrifice!” Bucky threw his hands into the air, frustrated. “You don’t have to prove you’re worth loving with pieces of yourself!”

“Oh my god, you hypocritical cybernetic drama queen,” Tony managed. “What happened to ‘I’m going to be a monster so Steve doesn’t have to’? What happened to ‘let’s leave my brain chip in a literal dumpster fire’?”

“Yeah, and we all need _therapy_ , not _submarine jail_ ,” Bucky shouted.

“Great!” Tony shot back, “Awesome! I will get right on that, I will talk to a real doctor who stays awake and everything, but can I just point out that _we just gave Hydra everything it needs to make its last ditch recovery?_ ”

“Uh,” said Bucky. “Oh.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Tony shouted. “ _Oh_.”

“No,” Bucky said, “I meant, ‘Oh. You remember what I said about not solving every problem with self sacrifice?’”

Tony stared at him. Bucky thought he might be turning purple.

“I basically meant the problems we have other than this one.” Bucky admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “I smashed the blue glowy part and stuck the case back on with superglue while we were still in the tower. I didn’t know then that it could withstand a nuclear blast. I guess my metal arm is pretty strong?”

“You broke the only copy of your original brain before you even knew you were going to have to,” Tony said, incredulous.

Bucky made a ‘kinda?’ face.

“We are all so fucked up,” Tony realized. “We are all so completely fucked up.”

“ _I am going to kill you both_ ,” Steve bellowed, and Tony and Bucky both whirled around. Steve had somehow appeared behind them without either of them noticing, despite wearing thirty pounds of stealth tac gear and _carrying what looked like an entire massaging recliner set with an attached hair dryer, what the fuck_. Natasha stood behind him, looking bored as usual, but somehow even more disappointed than Bucky had thus far seen her.

Definitely magic. Bucky gaped. 

Tony did not. “How do you keep doing this? Do you have a tracker in his leg?” Tony accused. “Are you always just hiding behind a corner somewhere waiting for your cue?”

Steve’s face grew darker. Bucky dove for verbal safety. “Tony was going to jump into the exploding CIA facility in full armor to get my memories back and make you like him again,” he blurted, hoping that throwing Tony under the bus would get him off the hook.

Tony turned on him, betrayed. “ _Barnes_ brought along the only copy of his memories to use as a literal bargaining chip but smashed up all the electronics so now he can’t get anything replaced,” he shot back.

Bucky glared at him. “ _Tony_ was going to let himself get killed when Hydra blew the building so that we could escape because he thinks we’re all terrible, selfish assholes who would let him do that.”

Tony narrowed his eyes. “Well, Barnes was—”

“You’re going to make Steve’s head explode,” Natasha told them firmly. “Please stop. And we found you because you’re wandering around enemy territory shouting at full volume, but I’m getting the idea that a tracker in your leg might be a good idea, too.”

“Steve’s shouting,” Bucky pointed out, sulking.

“I can’t even speak to you two right now,” Steve managed. “I am holding delicate science equipment and I am going to break it into its component pieces if I try. We’re far enough out that Natasha could bring the jet in, so please get on board and sit in opposite corners until I can talk without wanting to strangle anybody anymore.”

“Fat chance of that happening anytime soon,” Tony muttered, but got with the program when the chair in Steve’s hands creaked alarmingly.

***

The scamper in furious silence back to the Quinjet was surprisingly uneventful, and the tension was somewhat helped by how damn ridiculous Steve looked schlepping a giant dentist chair at a dead run with his angry dad face on. Bucky was very proud of himself when he didn’t giggle from the nerves. It would probably not have helped.

“You don’t even need that anymore,” Tony said, annoyed, as he watched Steve set the chair down carefully in the cargo hold and strap it to the floor. “Sergeant Sacrifice over there destroyed anything we have left to download, remember?”

The metal arm of the chair made a high-pitched crunching noise under Steve’s grip.

“Or, you know, fine, whatever,” Tony said, backing off quickly. “Maybe we can use it as a sculpture in the board room.”

“At least you have all your clothes on this time,” Natasha said to Bucky, probably trying to avert the looming fight for a few more minutes. “And that’s actually a jock cup down your pants, good job.”

“What did you do to your _face_ ,” Steve asked, turning from the chair and glaring at him.

Bucky batted his eyes. “I made myself beautiful for you, Stevie,” he simpered, flipping his hair over his shoulder. The purple spikes swung right back and got stuck in the eye makeup. Again. “Don’t you think I’m pretty?”

“You…are…always beautiful, Buck,” Steve managed, wrath and exhaustion battling with his unrelenting earnestness, “but there have been times you were… _more_ beautiful.” 

“I just saved you from having a building exploded on top of you,” Bucky said haughtily. “I only escaped because Hydra agents don’t look behind the doors they bust through. I think I deserve a little more fawning than that.”

Steve wasn’t holding anything, but if he had, it would definitely have made another upsetting noise. His face went a funny color and the muscles in his jaw jumped.

“Seriously,” Natasha said. “Opposite sides. Sit down and shut up. You’re not going to have saved anybody if Steve dies of an aneurism.”

“If anyone can give a supersoldier an aneurism, it’s probably us,” Tony chimed in from the corner, but mimed zipping his lips when Natasha turned a silent snake stare on him. Bucky decided to follow his lead and kept his mouth shut for the rest of the flight back.

***

“Go…Go inside for a minute,” Steve told Bucky when they landed, pinching the bridge of his nose. The long silence hadn’t been good on any of them—without the situational comedy of forklifting the chair across a field, the tension had ratcheted up to eleven. “I’ll be down. I just need a second.”

“That means ‘go inside while I yell at Tony, I’ll be in to yell at you soon’,” Tony stage whispered, and Bucky got while the getting was good. Behind him he could already hear the fight starting up.

Natasha clapped him on the back as he speedwalked past, her eyes on the argument, looking like she was one step away from making popcorn.

What did you even do while waiting for Captain America to come shout at you? Bucky spent the elevator ride down considering and discarding seduction attempts, escape plans, and evasion techniques, but by the time he got into the apartment, he had mostly settled on a shower and something to eat. He decided to table the plan to lay himself out naked on the bed afterwards in the hope his dick would successfully distract Steve from his tirade, figuring he could strip in a last-ditch play to disengage Steve’s brain if everything got too heated. He was pretty sure it would work.

For the time being, though, he made a sandwich. He had gnawed his way through half the grilled cheese before the indignation caught up to him, and the rest of the sandwich went down slowly as the outrage welled up and slowly gave way to fuming resentment.

By the time Steve came in, still wearing his suit and looking as wrung out as he ever did after huge emotional upheavals, Bucky was in _no mood to care_.

“I can’t believe you _sent me to my room_ ,” Bucky shouted the second the door closed, and Steve took a surprised step back into it. “Was I supposed to _think about what I’ve done_ , you _patronizing asshole_ , what the hell would _you have done_ , you were about to be _exploded and brainwashed for Hydra_ , you _hypocrital dickbag_.”

Steve dropped his helmet on the polished wooden floor and hung his head. The bright blue skullcap made an _orororr_ noise as it rolled down the hallway. “You’re right,” Steve said, rubbing his face. “I’m sorry.”

Bucky had his mouth open, a head full of steam, and an accusing finger ready to poke Steve repeatedly in his overbearing Playboy model bosom, so the unexpected surrender had a lot of momentum to trip up.

“You—” Bucky managed, pointing at Steve. “You can’t just…! I’m still so…! Augh!”

“Tony yelled at me first,” Steve said, spreading his arms in a shrug. “He was right too. I would have done exactly what you did, and I wouldn’t be even a tiny bit sorry.”

“That is not fair,” Bucky protested, slightly hysterical. “I was gonna yell at you for thirty minutes, _minimum_. I had everything ready!”

“I love you,” Steve said. “I’m sorry. You scared me.”

“ _What am I supposed to say to that_ ,” Bucky yelled. “What am I supposed to say to that? I can’t say anything to that!”

“That’s okay,” Steve told him, and then there it was, that jerkoff little smile at the corner of his mouth. “You said you had half an hour of material. Don’t waste it. You can go through the whole tirade if it makes you feel better.”

“Oh my god,” Bucky managed, ready to strangle him. “You asshole. You smug fucking asshole. I know you know I’m going to forgive you, but you should _maybe wait to be such a douchebag until I actually do_.”

“I could go and wait in the shower while you work on that?” Steve offered, gesturing. “I’m kind of gross.”

“ _Get out of my sight_ ,” Bucky told him, and Steve got.

Bucky stood at the counter breathing heavily for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the shower starting up. Then he swore, grabbed the rope he’d set aside to celebrate Steve’s return, and climbed in after him.

“I deserve,” he growled, anchoring Steve’s hands against the wall above him with the metal arm and looping the rope around the showerhead with the other, “ _so much thank you sex_.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, voice rough already. He swallowed and closed his eyes. “Yeah, I’m okay with that.” 

“Okay,” Bucky said, putting pressure on Steve’s wrists. Steve sucked in a breath and Bucky felt Steve’s dick twitch against his hip. “I am going to tie you to the shower, motorboat your tits, _twice_ , like I’d _fucking planned_ , and then I am going suck the smug right out of you through your dick.” Steve groaned, head dropping back to thump against the tile. “You better come up with some good ideas after that, because I have been through some serious shit today and you need to pick up the slack.”

“Oh,” Steve managed, opening his eyes again and gazing up at Bucky through his lashes, “I think I can come up with a couple things.”

“You had _fucking better_ ,” Bucky growled, and yanked the rope tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've talked about puking so much in this story we should consider renaming it. Possible ideas for the new name
> 
>   * Bucky Barnes Pukes his Tonsils: A Lot
>   * Bucky and Steve Bone Also There is a Lot of Vomit But These Are Unconnected
>   * Wretched Retching Bucky Beats His Fucking Fucked Amnesia (and Steve's Ass)
> 



	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I reread all my chapters to make sure I'd wrapped everything up in this last chapter and
> 
> -Bucky is ravenous for like two chapters and totally forgets about it. It's...because...his brain is done healing. Maybe. I guess it's not though? I think I said it wasn't. Well there are real science reasons I promise.  
> -Natasha and Steve's silent conversations, which I thought were subtle but understandable, are actually opaque as hell  
> -How did I reread as many times as I did, had THREE OTHER PEOPLE checking things over, and STILL get typos?  
> -I started promising we were almost done about halfway through the fic. It's crazy to see. I'm like "No but I promise NEXT CHAPTER"
> 
> I guess what I'm saying is if you had all your expectations up for the ending being great when it finally came (Now. This actually is the ending) just consider my previous performance is all.

“Tony is going to lose his shit,” Steve gasped, sides heaving, and fell back against the destroyed fragments of the couch. It crunched under his sudden weight. “Oh my god. We wrecked the place. The only thing we left alone is that lamp.”

He wasn’t… wrong. In the past 24 hours, they’d crashed their way through the plumbing, glass sliding door, and countertops when the showerhead had ripped out of the wall, then every upholstered item and flat surface in the living room when they’d moved the party out of the flood zone. Bucky had particularly enjoyed being bent over the coffee table, and Steve came in like three seconds when Bucky held him down and arched over the arm of the sofa. Unfortunately, the furniture hadn’t really been made to take the abuse; it looked like someone had gone through with a pallet of knives and sledgehammers. 

And yet the lamp stood intact and unmarred on its side nearby, the shade not even bent.

Bucky, sweating heavily from the _exuberant_ cardio they’d just completed, ran a hand through the tacky mess he’d left across the side table earlier. Then he leaned across Steve, bit his ear lightly, and smeared supersoldier jizz right down the side of the ceramic.

Steve laughed so hard he started coughing, and Bucky grinned, dropping a kiss under the curve of Steve’s jaw. 

“I love you,” Steve wheezed, falling back again on the splintered upholstery. “But you are disgusting.”

“You love getting me disgusting,” Bucky hummed, trailing little bites along Steve’s neck and across to his shoulder, “but if you want to clean up, blowjobs in the bathtub sound good.”

Steve _hmm_ ed and raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty sure we destroyed enough in there when I pulled a little too hard on the ropes,” Steve told him thoughtfully. “In retrospect, shower bondage is not the amazing idea it seemed like at the time.”

“Are you kidding me, Rogers,” Bucky said with mock incredulity, rearing back as if mortally offended. “That was a _fantastic_ idea, you came on the _ceiling_. Plus, it’s probably giving Tony a hernia to sit around hearing about it from Friday. He has to yell at us, but he _can’t_ , because he might have to see a superpenis if he busts in.”

That set Steve laughing again, and Bucky kissed Steve at the corner of his mouth, hefted him over the metal shoulder, and headed for the _guest_ bathroom down the hall. Holding on to Steve when he was covered in the mess they’d made and laughing like a loon was hard enough, but when Steve started kissing him anywhere he could reach, it got significantly harder. Bucky almost dropped him on the tile of the bathroom twice while getting the bath started. 

They got in before the water was past the halfway mark, which made the bath completely gross on its own, then got distracted and made everything even grosser by the time it was full. Eventually they ended up fucked out enough to take the time to drain it all and refill, and Bucky curled up with his back against Steve’s chest and let him wash his hair.

They’d half swamped the bathroom without even touching the plumbing, this time, and the water seeping off the little step to the lip of the tub made a steady _Drip. Drip_. in the quiet room. Bucky let his head loll to the side as Steve rinsed his Deep Nourishing Avocado Shampoo out, watching water soak into the thick pile of the bathmat. 

“You know,” Steve said into his shoulder after a while, “it’s okay if you wanted to break the chip and it wasn’t for me.”

Bucky froze. The bathmat was suddenly _super interesting_.

Steve tried to give him some time, rubbing fingers through Bucky’s hair, but eventually filled the silence himself. “I know you’d give up any part of yourself for me, Buck. I’m not trying to question that. But you broke the chip before you even knew you’d need to. It’s okay if this was for you, too.”

Bucky picked at a new crack they’d made in the enamel for a moment. Then, “I didn’t…” He frowned, then tried again. “Shit. It’s selfish.”

Steve made an encouraging noise and rubbed his back, but didn’t say anything.

Bucky sighed. “I wasn’t ready to leave. I wasn’t ready to let him take this back.”

Steve’s arm went tight around him at that, and he made a pained noise. “Who is—I—Wait. Do you think we’ve been talking about putting a different Bucky in and taking you out?”

Bucky shrugged.

“Hold on. I can’t. Hold on.” Steve took some deep breaths, and eventually his hold on Bucky eased. The water sloshed around him and he levered himself to a more upright position. “I would never,” Steve finally said, every word flat and careful, “allow anyone to erase you to put a new person in. Not Tony, not me, not even you. That is not what this has all been about.”

Bucky finally turned and stared at him, disbelieving. “Tony and Natasha are both _pretty sure that it is_.”

“Picking and choosing which parts to remember, making an entirely new version, got close enough to…shit, to scare me, yeah. I was scared Tony would erase you,” Steve admitted, “but I _calmed down_. I wouldn’t have agreed to it if I thought he was gonna _murder you and stick a new person in your skin_ , Bucky, _Christ_. I know you. No,” He said when Bucky tried to shrug it off. “ _I know you_. There has never been anyone else inside your head. It has always been you.”

“I want to be who I am now,” Bucky said. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“Then I’ll destroy the backup,” Steve promised. “If it makes you feel better about, shit, believing all your friends are trying to kill you, I’ll set it on fire and stuff it down the garbage disposal.”

“There _is_ no backup,” Bucky said, a little hysterical. He flopped back against Steve, more water splashing onto the floor. “Tony didn’t want me loose in his system. You’re stuck with me and you’re not getting the Winter Soldier back.”

“Of course there’s a backup,” Steve said, rolling his eyes. “I know how to use computers, Buck, and so does Natasha. We weren’t going to risk your memories sitting around where one of Tony’s robots could just knock them over by accident.”

Bucky sat back up and stared at him.

“I’m not a _moron_ ,” Steve said, visibly annoyed. 

“You’d do that,” Bucky said, ignoring that for the moment. “You’d destroy him for me.”

“You’re not _in there_ ,” Steve insisted. “I’ll destroy your memory of the time I threw up on your shoes in front of your mother, sure. I kind of think you’d like to keep it since you love to give me shit for it, and I still think the bad stuff is still a part of you, and so it’s important. But they’re not _someone else_.”

Bucky dropped slowly back against Steve again, staring at the ceiling where the condensation was starting to drip, too. “Maybe,” he said after a moment. “Maybe don’t set things on fire just yet. I don't want ‘em,” he added quickly, turning a little to side eye Steve. “But…maybe don’t delete everything for a little bit.”

“Whatever you want, Buck,” Steve agreed, and started working in the conditioner.

***

Natasha showed up the next morning, took one look at Bucky, Steve, and the apartment, then turned right back around again and walked out.

“I’m fine, by the way!” Bucky shouted after her, standing naked in the catastrophe of the kitchen, holding a mug of instant coffee and a handful of Froot Loops. The coffeemaker had been one of the many casualties of the weekend. Natasha gave no sign she’d heard him, though, and continued into the elevator before mashing the ‘close door’ button. “We’re good! Man,” he said, turning to back around. Steve, warm and clean and marginally more dressed in sweatpants and a smile, was looking at him fondly over the edge of his own mug. “You’d think they’d be used to us trashing shit by now. Bionic arm, super strength, and endless libidos aren’t exactly a fresh development.”

Steve went a little red around the ears. “Uh,” he managed.

Bucky gave him a look. “Don’t tell me this is new,” he said skeptically. “You already admitted we didn’t do much aside from kill people and bone.”

Steve scrubbed at the back of his neck. “We had…We’ve got that history, is all. We tended to be a little more…careful with each other, before.”

Bucky chewed on that for a moment along with the Froot Loops. “Huh,” he said, swallowing. “You miss it being gentle at all?”

“Uh,” Steve said again, looking like the deer Tony’s caught in the hovercraft headlights.

“Baby,” Bucky purred, setting down his horrible coffee and drifting closer to card his metal fingers through Steve’s hair. Steve made a soft, involuntary-sounding noise and leaned into it. “Sweetheart, all you gotta do is ask.”

“I don’t gotta ask, though,” Steve breathed, eyes fluttering shut. “I like it the new way, too.” 

“ _Yeah_ you do,” Bucky agreed, and Steve started laughing. “But we can do it sweet sometimes. I bet I like sweet just fine.”

Steve slipped his hands around Bucky’s waist, Bucky slipped his hands down Steve’s sweats, and they didn’t break _anything_.

***

That night Bucky snuck out of bed, crushed the lamp, whispered “Fuck you, Tony,” at the ceiling, and snuck back into the bed again.

***

“I want you both to know,” Tony declared from behind the pages of Ladies Home Journal, “that the first trauma I’m talking about is you two assholes.”

Bucky gave him a ‘fair enough’ shrug. 

The therapist’s office Bucky had finally dragged the group of them to was filled with potted plants, cozy furniture, and a white noise machine droning comfortingly in the corner. Bucky had assumed anywhere Friday recommended would be intimidatingly classy and expensive, the kind of place he’d be afraid to touch anything, but it was actually pretty warm and inviting. Natasha had claimed the armchair and a copy of Vogue with the regal assurance of a queen taking her throne, so Steve and Tony had awkwardly squished themselves into opposite sides of the couch before grabbing their own magazines at random and hiding in them. Bucky had flopped down half on top of Steve with his feet on the coffee table and promptly stuffed his face full of the chocolates in the bowl in the center.

“I’m billing you for the repairs to my guest apartment, too,” Tony assured them. He was still refusing to look directly at Bucky since Friday had told him about the lamp, but Bucky could tell he wanted to put on that same disgusted glower he made every time the serum won out over table manners. “The place needs a complete remodel after your bulldozer fuckfest, Jesus.”

“Do it,” Bucky agreed. “Steve says we’re rich. We’ve got so much money I’m free to lounge around with my dick out as a kept man for the rest of my probably immortal life.” He leaned back harder against Steve and tilted his head enough to leer at him. 

Steve pretended to be super interested in casual yet elegant summer outdoor table choices, but what Bucky could see of his face was bright red.

“You’re minorly rich,” Tony said, completely unimpressed, “ _thanks to me_ , since I got the government to _unfreeze all your backpay_.”

“And now you get that backpay as your reward,” Bucky said magnanimously, turning back to him. “You’re welcome.”

And then he swung his swanky new caramel leather boots up onto the couch and rested his feet on Tony’s lap.

Tony froze. The room froze. Hell, _Bucky_ froze—he’d only done it because he was getting so used to just letting his body do whatever it was comfortable with, and until now he hadn’t realized he was comfortable enough with Tony to use him as furniture. Still, there was no going back now. Bucky studiously examined the ceiling and pretended he’d meant to.

Tony stared at Bucky’s feet, then looked at Natasha. She gave him a thumbs up and ignored him otherwise. Bucky still couldn’t see much of Steve’s face, but what he could said there were soggy feelings going on behind the magazine.

“You’re going to _ruin_ my _suit_ ,” Tony complained eventually, but didn’t move to shove Bucky off. “And why is Natasha here? Natasha, why are you even here? Wait, scratch that, why doesn’t _she_ have to see a therapist?”

Natasha didn’t even look up. “I’m here because James can only bodily tackle one fleeing manbaby at a time, and there’s a chance both of you might make a break for it at once,” she said carelessly, flipping a page with one manicured finger. “And I don’t have to see the therapist because I wasn’t stupid enough to promise that I would.”

“It’s not stupid,” Steve said loyally, which was rich, considering the whining Bucky had been forced to put up with that morning. Bucky had needed to break out the crazy eyes and repeat ‘Suicide. Talk.’ no fewer than 18 times in a row. He made sure that thought was stunningly clear on his face, but Steve just pretended he couldn’t see it. “It’s healthy. It’s important to take care of your mental health.”

“I feel like promises made in the heat of furious sarcasm shouldn’t be binding,” Tony grumbled. “I’m pretty sure that’s in the Geneva Conventions somewhere.”

“Oh, _now_ you care about the Geneva Conventions,” Bucky said. “And Natasha doesn’t have to go because she seems like she has her shit pretty well together, honestly. You two are walking breakdowns.”

Steve’s head shot up, incredulous, and he met Tony’s eyes for a second before they both turned to stare at Natasha. She smiled sunnily back, licked her thumb, and turned another page.

“Your bar for mental stability is _way too low_ ,” Steve finally told Bucky. “We _really_ need to reintroduce you to Sam.”

“I want you to think about the logic of that statement,” Bucky told him, “and consider what it says that I am so concerned about how completely fucked up the three of us are anyway.”

Steve looked like he wanted to argue, but couldn’t come up with anything convincing. Tony gave Bucky’s ‘fair enough’ shrug from earlier.

“You’ll learn to use ‘I feel’ statements,” Natasha offered. “It helps with communication. Maybe you two can start talking instead of yelling.”

“I already know about ‘I feel’ statements,” Steve protested. “Watch. Tony, I feel angry when you’re a huge dick.”

“Yeah?” Tony said, slapping down his magazine. “Well I feel frustrated when you’re an overbearing jerkoff.”

“Those are not ‘I feel’ statements,” Natasha told them.

“Steve feels helpless when you risk your life and the lives of others and he has no power over everyone’s safety,” Bucky said blandly. “Tony feels sad when you don’t give his ideas a chance and work with him to make them better.”

“Don’t pretend you know anything about this either,” Natasha told him. “You have amnesia.”

“I feel like I don’t like ‘I feel’ statements anymore,” Tony said, making to get up. “I feel vulnerable. Let’s get a cheeseburger and complain about Nanny Barnes instead.”

Bucky’s legs turned to iron and Tony flopped right back into the couch with an _oof_.

“No,” Steve said. “We promised. We’re doing this. We’re learning to communicate and deal with our issues.”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Bucky said, relieved. 

“And _then_ we can get cheeseburgers and complain about Bucky,” Steve assured Tony, looking serious. Tony cocked his head, nodded, and sat back in the cushions to wait.

“Maybe while we’re here you can both work on not being assholes,” Bucky said, and buried his nose in Cat Fancy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah anyway sorry for the "everyone laughing freeze frame, followed by a slow zoom out to cheesy music"-type ending, but not sorry enough not to use it. I feel like I'm in a 90s feel-good movie. 
> 
> I mean, like, one with premature ejaculation facials, massive sex-related property damage, repeated mentions of vomit and non-consensual body modification, and swearing every other line.
> 
> IS THIS FINISHED?? IS THIS WHAT BEING FINISHED FEELS LIKE???? Oh my god this is amazing. I don't know what to do with myself.
> 
> Thank you again everyone who always sent me wonderful comments and kudos throughout, even when I was MIA and responding to NONE of them-- I read every one and it's what got the chapters out! It was absolutely you guys. THANK YOU!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Closed Book](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12881133) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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